MY MALADROIT PRINCIPLES
Signal-steeples and little green men
and all those things that go bump in
the night. I brought you home to that?
My own seven-stairway mountain on
a grubby city street where pushcart
vendors hawked ribbons and hats,
and the Sanitation Department ran
its circles around the squares.
-
I held a broken crutch and used it
only for leaning, beneath the Seward
Statue in Madison Square Park. I'd
been there so many times in the dark;
past depths of pure danger and pools
of cool blood. We stood for a moment
and waited. I recalled you asking, 'Is
this Gramercy, or not?'
-
The answer, of course, was 'Or not,'
and I stated so in my ineloquent way;
Gramercy was some five blocks off
and involved other places in another,
different, way : private garden under
lock and key; the Artists' Club and
thee, and me.
-
They tell me now the Gramercy Hotel
has been shuttered, yes; and they're
blaming some disease, but the landlord
owed nine million too, to the guy who
owned the land the place was on (it
gets like that in NYC; someone 'owns'
the building, but another 'owns' the
land it's on. Go figure?). No one
goes there any more. Even the
bar is gone.
-
So, we shook and waited, and people
passed by. You had on a shawl from
Ceylon, but Ceylon is called something
different now, so I never made mention.
Your eyes has a sparkle-sheen I liked.
We weren't supposed to be together.
-
Wasn't it Yogi Berra who said, and I
quote: 'That place is too crowded, no
one goes there anymore.'
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