The poem
The city purrs, it hums along, the morning hardly risen. A well-dressed drunk smears her finger across a doorman’s lips and whispers. Someone stumbles. Someone curses. Someone hoses down the pavement. We must have made a mess of things again, all fuzzy black and white and greenish at the corners. Some final thing that put us in our places. You’re still standing in your winter coat alongside everything you wanted and deserve. But you were thinner. The desk clerk looked right through you. The cabby didn’t listen. You were out of sorts back then, you say, but you’re still frowning! In vain a shrieking siren repeats itself and fades. The quiet idles there, a crosswalk signal chirping. You’re still standing in your winter coat, but I don’t know you. Someone scrambles down a fire escape, his shirt a flag that’s shredded. A boy salutes. And then his mother, too. She stoops to smooth his collar. She makes a sculpture of her packages. You’re a different person now, you say, but you will never happen.