Poem [“Khrushchev is coming on the right…

Krushchev is coming on the right day!

the cool graced light

is pushed off the enormous glass piers by hard wind

and everything is tossing, hurrying on up

this country

has everything but politesse, a Puerto Rican cab driver says

and five different girls I see

look like Piedie Gimbel

with her blonde hair tossing too,

as she looked when I pushed

her little daughter on the swing on the lawn it was also windy

last night we went to a movie and came out,

Ionesco is greater

than Beckett, Vincent said, that's what I think, blueberry blintzes

and Khrushcev was probably being carped at

in Washington, no

politesse

Vincent tells me about his mother's trip to Sweden

Hans tells us

about his father's life in Sweden, it sounds like Grace Hartigan's

painting Sweden

so I go home to bed and names drift through my

head

Purgatorio Merchado, Gerhard Schwartz and Gaspar Gonzales,

all unknown figures of the early morning as I go to work

where does the evil of the year go

when September takes New York

and turns it into ozone stalagmites

deposits of light

so I get back up

make coffee, and read François Villon, his life, so dark

New York seems blinding and my tie is blowing up the street

I wish it would blow off

though it is cold and somewhat warms

my neck

as the train bears Krushchev on to Pennsylvania Station

and the light seems to be eternal

and joy seems to be inexorable

I am foolish enough always to find it in wind

Source: Lunch Poems (City Lights Books, 2014)