You'll notice there's a mention in that poem, "The Stairs,"
and although this is not planned,
the stairs in this apartment building
seem to show up in every single one of these poems in some way,
so you might enjoy tracking that.
My building is a co-op, a peculiar form
of urban real estate, in which people at some point
band together and buy an apartment building,
and then sell shares in it, rather than the real estate
itself.
And co-ops are notorious for co-op boards and co-op
presidents, which can be testy.
This is called, "Ghost Story, West 16th."
Pam lived 40 years in apartment one
and ran our co-op with an iron hand.
She rules by simply keeping needed information to herself.
Two doors open from her place into the hall,
if I came down late the year the buzzer didn't work to greet
some man I'd soon come to know, or fumbled hopeless with
my keys at 4 AM, I felt her eye fixed behind a peephole that
bent the hallway light around me to a ring of-- not shame
exactly--
but a stubborn, residual embarrassment.
Two months dead, she seems to hover at that door still.
Vigilant, disapproving, not on moral grounds,
but because, you never know.
Secretary for our meetings, I duly
noted when she announced, if you're
having a visitor at night, well, lucky for you,
but be sure to escort him to the door.
Abrasive, she hated conflict.
If anyone stood up to her, she'd cry.
She earned her MSW at Hunter years before,
and afternoons saw clients in her dim, cat-shadowed parlor,
beside an untouched upright so heavy, the floor beneath it
sank.
Sometimes I'd see her ushering patients out, beaming at each,
a benevolence so at odds with how I knew her,
it made me dizzy.
After surgery, leaning one light-- leaning
one night against the stairs she hadn't climbed in years,
she reached to touch me through the balustrade and said,
I am utterly tired of life.
Her daughter, a professor in a distant state,
had four decades of her mother's things
hauled away, feckless piano among them,
and accepted an offer--
a million and a half in cash.
A floor-through, after all, with an airless, private garden
in the back.
The renovations nearly done, I took a tour,
and here's what startled me-- that rueful, hectoring,
sarcastic spirit presided still.
For this money, she thought, it ought to be beautiful, modern,
nothing for ghosts to catch on.
It's hard enough to leave.
Don't you know by now I loved you all?
I am now going to admit an embarrassing thing, which
is that I left my glasses in the apartment,
and I will be a much more comfortable reader
if I have my glasses.
So if you will just take a breath, talk
among yourselves for a moment, I will be right back.