This is another New York City poem.
And well, it's an autobiographical thing.
Poem's called Shelley, it's the poet Shelley.
I read Shelley one day.
So it's about poor Shelley, who probably turn over
in his grave.
He's still turning over in his grave.
Shelley-- poet of the dead leaves
driven like ghosts, driven like pestilence-stricken multitudes.
I read you first one rainy evening
in New York City in my atrocious Slavic accent,
saying the mellifluous verses from a battered, much stained
volume I bought earlier that day in a used bookstore
in Fourth Avenue ran by initiates
of the occult masters.
The little money I had already spent,
I walked the streets, my nose in the book.
I sat in a dingy coffee shop with last summer's dead flies
on the table.
The owner was an ex-sailor who had
grown a huge hump on his back watching
the empty streets, the rain.
He was glad to have me sit and read.
He'd refill my cup with a liquid as dark as sticks.
Shelley spoke of a mad, blind, dying King,
rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
of graves from which the glorious phantom may
burst to illuminate our tempestuous day.
I, too, felt like a glorious phantom going
to have my dinner in a Chinese restaurant I knew so well.
It had a three-fingered waiter who
would bring my soup and rice each night
without uttering a word.
I never saw anyone else.
The kitchen was separated by a curtain of glass beads
which clicked faintly.
If the front door opened, the front door open--
the kitchen was separated by a curtain of glass beads
which clicked faintly if the front door opened.
The front door opened at the evening
to admit the pale, little girl with glasses.
The poet spoke of the everlasting universe of things,
of gleams of a remoter world, which visit the soul in sleep,
over desert peopled by storms alone.
The streets were full of broken umbrellas, which
looked like funereal kites that little Chinese girl might
have made.
The bars of MacDougal Street were emptying.
There had been a fistfight.
A man leaned against the lamppost
as if crucified, the rain washing the blood off his face.
In a dimly-lit side street, where the sidewalk
was like a ballroom mirror at closing time,
a well-dressed man without shoes asked me for money.
His eyes shone.
He looked triumphant like a fencing master who
had just struck a mortal blow.
How strange, though, was the world's raffle one dark October
night.
The yellowed volume of poetry with its splendors and glooms,
which I examined by the light of storefronts, drug stores,
and barbershops.
Afraid of my small windowless room,
cold as a tomb of an infant emperor.
You can only write about Shelley and get away
with that last line, though.
What else do we know?
It was just the thing that--
anyway, thank you.
Let's see, where am I now?
And what time is it?
Let's see.