Text of "164 East 72nd Street"

 164 East 72nd Street

These city apartment windows – my grandmother's once –

Must be replaced come Fall at great expense. 

Pre-war sun shone through them on many a Saturday

Lunch unconsumed while frantic adolescence 

Wheedled an old lady into hat and lipstick, 

Into her mink, the taxi, the packed lobby, 

Into our seats. Whereupon gold curtains parted 

On Lakmé's silvery, not yet broken-hearted

Version of things as they were. But what remains

Exactly as it was except those panes? 

Today's memo from the Tenants' Committee deplores

Even the ongoing deterioration 

Of the widows in our building. Well. On the bright side,

Heating costs and street noise will be cut. 

Sirens at present like intergalactic gay 

Bars in full swing whoop past us night and day.

Sometimes, shocked wide awake, I've tried to reckon

How many lives – fifty, a hundred thousand? – 

Are being shortened by that din of crosstown 

Ruby flares, wherever blinds don't quite . . . 

And shortened by how much? Ten minutes each? 

Reaching the Emergency Room alive, the victim 

Would still have to live years, just to repair 

The sonic fallout of a single scare.

''Do you ever wonder where you'll – '' Oh my dear,

Asleep somewhere, or at the wheel. Not here. 

Within months of the bathroom ceiling's cave-in, 

Which missed my grandmother by a white hair, 

She moved back South. The point's to live in style,

Not to drop dead in it. On a carpet of flowers 

Nine levels above ground, like Purgatory, 

Our life is turning into a whole new story:

Juices, blue cornbread, afternoons at the gym –

Imagine who remembers how to swim! 

Evenings of study, or intensive care 

For one another. Early to bed. And later,

If the mirror's drowsy eye perceives a slight

But brilliant altercation between curtains 

Healed by the leaden hand of – one of us? 

A white-haired ghost? or the homunculus

A gentle alchemist behind them trains 

To put in order these nocturnal scenes – 

Two heads already featureless in gloom 

Have fallen back to sleep. Tomorrow finds me

Contentedly playing peekaboo with a sylphlike 

Quirk in the old glass, making the brickwork 

On the street's far (bright) side ripple. Childhood's view.

My grandmother – an easy-to-see-through

Widow by the time she died – made it my own.

Bless her good sense. Far from those parts of town

Given to high finance, or the smash hit and steak house,

Macy's or crack, Saks or quick sex, this neighborhood 

Saunters blandly forth, adjusting its clothing. 

Things done in purple light before we met, 

Uncultured things that twitched as on a slide 

If thought about, fade like dreams. Two Upper East Side

Boys again! Rereading Sir Walter Scott 

Or Through the Looking Glass, it's impossible not

To feel how adult life, with its storms and follies, 

Is letting up, leaving me ten years old, 

Trustful, inventive, once more good as gold 

– And counting on this to help, should a new spasm

Wake the gray sleeper, or to improve his chances 

When ceilings flush with unheard ambulances.

"The New Yorker," 66:1 (January 1990): 61-62.
A Scattering of Salts. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Collected Poems. Ed. J. D. McClatchy, Stephen Yenser. New York: Knopf, 2001.