4256. CORNERS

CORNERS
Here where things meet, the lines converge
and pass; like engines of memory, they leave
noises behind them. Vivaldi violins, a morning
suite in E, a moment that draws us in and speaks.
I'm not the one in the middle for this endeavor.
-
Look homeward angel, Thomas Wolfe wrote.
The land beneath the sky was waving with
green grass and the wild grains of a thousand
seasons. This land is your land, this land is
mine; all that Americana crap, now gone.
-
I huddle in a collar turned up to my chin;
reading the rain and the wind, trying to amass
a 12th Street sense of some quarters and a dime.
'Hey buddy, can you spare a line?' was all I could
think to say. The strange businessman peered.
-
My name was Emil Baron. My name was Robert
Lane. My name was Ernest Cauldwell. These names
are all the same - those interchangeable lost men
of a hundred Bowery streets. Every last one of them
now is dead - their streets have all converged and
formed a long, grand, Memory Lane; while, now,
everything else is brutal and drained with a
a new architecture of waiting and pain.