[13] You come back to the hole-in-the-wall in the afternoon for a nap. And you are woken up by an apparition who walks into the room, a living proof that human skin is as tough as it is fragile. It must be a “she” for the voice that says hello to you has a high pitch. You nod and wave, fascinated by all the tattoos covering almost all the exposed, which is quite a bit, part of her body. You later learn from a paper that there is a national tattoo convention going on the city, and so she must be a participant in that.

YWH Bless USA; a nation of cults, subgroups, tribes that can gather around any and every possible thing: motorcycles, tattoos, stamp collections, various strains of music, various versions of YWH, i.e., houses of worship (few benign but mostly rabid, frothing at the mouth about how their Man is the man, and the rest all handmaidens of Satan. This is not a nation that is going to dogs, as the certain people with certain political beliefs would have you believe, but to just as dangerous gods. Devil take both dog and god!) etc.

[14] There are thoughts that run through your head as you walk down Broadway: a card in the game of Monopoly finally has risen from the dead. And like anything that might rise form the dead, it crumbling and rotting and giving off heavenly perfume of sweat. Resurrected anima would be like this, not dressed in some fair garb, as all iconology would have one believe.

You amble along people speaking in tongues, arguing, standing around vacantly, women careening down the sidewalks dressed in high fashion (why does it appear that New York has more creatures of the female kind than elsewhere? Is it because of the human density? Is it because you can’t avoid them as elsewhere?). Watching, absorbing, polishing the bearings of your neck to a high shine as it spins around and around, a carousel, you come to the bookstore that a friend has recommended to you.

[15] Wonderland. Temple. Faire Grounds. Dump of glitterbones. This city is apparently a shopping haven – you wouldn’t know because nothing else matters for you but this, this bookstore. You ricochet from shelf to shelf till you end up in the poetry section. You grab a ladder from a nearby aisle and begin your raid. The pile builds up, book upon book, a tottering tower of desire; that desire to gnaw everything down to the bone. Language, that tricky bitch, however keeps slipping on your tongue like quick silver, like falling rain, like the unattainable paradise of a dream.

You know you don’t have the wherewithal to buy all these, and even if you did your legs are not strong enough (Hemingway’s dictum wasn’t it? That to write one must have strong legs etc) to lug these around the walks that remain yet to be taken. So you spend the next half hour sorting and shuffling the stack like a pack of cards. You put the final pile on your head and sashay down the cashiers, so chic and all that, and put down the cash, stuff the geese down into your backpack and step out into the rush hour. Get your ass moving or the human torrent would knock you down. Praise the Lord.

[16] You get down into the belly and catch the train south to Brooklyn Bridge: a bridge of desire, of fog stealing over it on cat paws, of suicidal poets who twanged it like lyre to make word music, come Hart, come Walt, come Wystan, you come too hombre Federico Garcia, to this thing of mind arching between where one is to where one wants to be.

Also a bridge of stone and steel wire, also a bridge of tourists with snub nosed cameras, with bazooka cameras, a bridge of bicyclists, runners, roller skaters, of cars flowing underneath from Man-hat-tan-o to the outer isle of Brook-lyn-ne, one male, the other female, those metallic spermatozoa.

[17] You sit on a bench roughly in the middle of the Bridge letting you eyes rest, and feet rest too. Could Buddha have attained enlightenment under one of the end towers of the Bridge? Can you be illumined here? But for now no thought for a while. You then get up and wander over to the Brooklynne side: underneath wharves, brick buildings, a sort of a run down look in general. Behind you meanwhile are the towers of Manhattano throbbing with the pulse of currencies, and the setting sun.

You wander through the stylishly gentrified streets of Brooklyn Heights, where Auden lived, where Mailer lived, and which now, from all the Hun tanks parked in the streets, appear to be too expensive for writers to live anymore. Here is the church from where Abolitionists, those goddamned Yankees to all Southerners, railed against the stain of slavery, the stain that will never be atoned for it can’t be atoned for. Thinking these thoughts you reach the promenade overlooking the East River.

[18] The sun is now completely hidden behind the spires of the Lower Manhattano. It shines through skeletons of glass, as if it is x-raying the buildings for some forgotten tumor. Lady Liberty in the distance, waving her wand of light (which is also now nearly a big nothing, given how damned hard it is to get into the promised land) at tugs, coast guard speed boats, lights coming on here on the shores of Brooklynne, Manhattano, and in the far distance Jersey Cow.

You sit on the bench breathing the cold water air that is blowing into your face, and kissing your body through the thin rain jacket you are wearing, alternately reading Milosz’s meditations on Chinese hermit poets, watching dogs and dogwalkers, the changing of guard on the horizon, the incoming dark, the web of solitude, the wedding cake lights of Brooklyn bridge to your right, and then right ahead at the confluence of two rivers, Husdon and East, the slick glittering tongue of Manhattano drinking. In India all confluences of rivers are considered especially holy. Isn’t this too a holy confluence then, yes the holy confluence of dollar and man!

[1] The dense summer grows all around, Pressing its evergreen face to the windows, As it coaxes daylilies, daisies & dahlias Out from the wet earth into a thirsty air. And birds having built their nests in spring Are busy hop-hunting insects in the grass.

[2] This room is empty. This room is full of Books, is full of sweat, is full of longing. Emily looks at you with her one working eye, Her clumped hair dropping over your sheets in Tufts, and her smile becoming more crooked Every morning you reluctantly wake clutching Her, to stare into your empty days, empty fate.

[3] Everything has to have a symbol, a shorthand. Take the seasons. Say autumn. We can speak Of the autumn wind and that restless stranger Who keeps walking up and down the avenues Amidst the ragged orchestras of leaves, looking For some long lost score, when kissing turned Almost fecund, ending in a crescendo of promise.

[4] You are that stranger. This is your absent music. And Emily is a doll who won’t ever call your name. It is that time when you must change your life.