HENRY J
I haven't had to fool you in ages; you, the one in
the middle of this traipsing photograph, this old
and folded page, as if - in some cylindrical
weight of drive - your stance was ready and
always able to go. As I remember, I always
carried your hat. Those, for sure, were the days.
-
It was not always like that : before - the windswept
plaza, the harbor where the bridge went over, the
ferry-boat junkyard twisting in the water on the other
shore. Tugboats and barges, rolling by Uncle Milty's,
all that Staten Island garbage spitting back to Bayonne -
a silent war of steely matter across the Kill Van Kull.
-
And only now I remember myself : a young boy,
too young in fact to recall total things, watching the
big, gray Plymouths go by, seeing the parked trucks
slanted at the curb, watching the hatted postwar ladies,
too loud and too dull, as they sauntered by with ice cream,
black stockings with a line up the back, and black, netted
hats on their heads. It seemed a reverential, too-soon kingdom
already of love and lust together, into which I was already gone.
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