Walking in New York at Night

A pleasure of its own
after a hot summer's day.
The city has cooled off
and the smell of August has blown east and
away, making room for the
fecund odor of the earth below the massive
buildings. And the crazy throngs, too,
are also gone, leaving only lovers strolling,
men out of their suits and on their phones,
catching your eye if they can and if they cannot
it's a numbers game anyway and,
look! A party, drinkers with their bottles in
paper bags, passed around under the protective wall over the
sidewalk where construction has
begun eons ago and will never end.

And you think about the play you just saw,
and the intimacy of the actor talking about
the birth of his daughter, character or himself,
shadows sewn to his words,
and you think about the man in the audience next to you
who passed out from a heat stroke, or
so he told you at intermission with an apology and never
came back. You wonder if you should grab a hot pretzel
from a blue and yellow stand, thick crystals of salt
beading up over the top where the perspiration gathers.
In the end you decide, yes, that would be a very good idea, indeed,
and you pull it apart as you walk.

So many people walk and eat in New York City,
a place where you live in public.

You think about the conversation you listened in on at lunch, for
to say overheard would really be a
lie; an older man with his two grown daughters,
something you pieced together over cold zuchhini soup with
relief, because you could not tell if he was courting
these very young women with his
familiarity or if they worked in his office as they discussed
dating and relationships and then you heard
the man introduce the women, women whom you hadn't
turned around to look at, you didn't know what they
looked like but you gathered instead from the fry in their
voices and their cadence and the restaurant
they were young and wealthy, and the man you could see,
silver hair and a beautiful wristwatch, he introduced them to the
handsome Italian waiter at the French cafe as
his daughters.

But the Italian waiter was married, and so the
father continued to say a thing I hated to hear
to our migrant worker, "my daughters think
if only
you were a little taller
you would be
extremely
handsome."

But what you wonder about now and
wish he had spoken more on, the father that
is, is 9/11, for he had shared with his daughters what
he would have written in an autobiography if
ever he had done so or got the chance to do so.
"9/11 traumatized me for life."
But his daughters rushed him back to a conversation about their
meager dating lives.

And now, passing by the Empire State Building
at 11 o'clock in the evening, oh God, actually much
later than that, lost in time, you think about
that day, 9/11. You were far away yourself, watching
the second plane fly into the building
on the news as you brushed your teeth, although
you do have a friend who was late to
his job at the twin towers that day, but it that is not your story to tell.

But we all felt
something
that day

Whereas now,
what do we feel?

Do you feel?
Do ya feel me?
But really, do you?

We must take these small joys not
for granted in each moment,
sleepy though we may stumble.

We must take in one another and if we cannot
because we are too shy we must take
in this thing here in your hands,
this
object you hold this simple thing.

Simple and important.
The thick salt, acrid on your tongue, preparing
your palate for the soft fleshy dough below it. The
water dripping down from an air conditioner
onto your head and the grace it was a machine
and not a bird or a person. A tree growing
in the cracks of a sidewalk. A confused girl
carrying a pizza box in two hands
like a serving tray. A boy who lives on the streets with
his rottweiller, all four eyes big and brown, looking
up hungrily as the pizza strolls by. The cool wind
blowing your hair back and a doorman
nodding at you with a wink.

Your heart pumping in your chest,
the pulse in your veins pushing against
the skin of your arms, your breath
heating up the roof of your mouth, cars honking
and a woman moaning somewhere, a flash of a painting
from a museum, a flower, inside, deep inside the flesh of
the pastels of the petals, Georgia O'Keefe and a skull
and a hearkening back to an ancient time
so far back there were no cities and the violence was
different then but there were no guns in schools and
no planes flying into buildings or cars plowing down crowds of
people in the streets, it was probably more visceral
the violence before this kind of city of prosperity could
render those without vulnerable enough to fight or suffer
the consequences,

oh, how happy to have this city, despite the
fact a man just told you it was
a hustle and a grind and yet

just past midnight,
you find it - not - serene - but
something altogether holy.