New York

With $114 in stock boy savings

     I bought a ticket for New York where I found

a job at Orange Julius in Times Square

     and a room at a West 43rd hotel.

I worked from midnight to 7 and gave

     free Juliuses to methadone addicts

who showed me their clinic IDs

     as if they were magic passports.

Afternoons I walked and saw the new immigrants

     through basement apartment windows

crowded in smoky rooms, laughing and talking

     after their day of hard, tedious work.

An Indian mystic in the subway told me

     how long I would live and my mother's name

and showed me a worn photo of his class

     gathered around a robed man who

must have been a hundred years old.

     In the subway I also met Mark the socialist

who I believed until I found out he was

     a corporate president's son from Chicago

living on the dole in Manhattan.

Everyone had a cause in New York,

     from the cabbie who lectured me on doom

and deliverance to the man at the deli

     who spilled my coffee and told me

he knew the secret of getting rich but

     you had to work 23 hours a day.

I went to hear Charles Mingus at the empty

     Two Saints where he sat Buddha-like

at the bar on breaks, sipping Pouilly Fuisse

     and nodding to me as I passed unable to speak.

I rode the Staten Island ferry with the lost

     men and women who stood in hooded raincoats

and stared out over the water toward the hidden

     Atlantic.  June rainstorms swept the streets 

empty for an hour as people waited in Wall Street

     lobbies, marble museums, and under marquees

and I ate hot dogs at Nathan's.  The rain

     reminded me of my Midwest home when the winds rose

bringing dust and black clouds.  I was free

     in New York, and broke, alone, and hungry.

I went back to the jazz clubs when I could afford

     the cover and nursed an underage beer,

trying to look as hip as I could in clothes

     from a $2.99 store and a red bandanna

that added a mature touch, I hoped.

     One night Rahsaan Roland Kirk, blind

and half-paralyzed from a stroke, played

     like three men with his crazy horns,

a manzello, stritch, harmonium and nose flute,

     simultaneous saxophones and a crepuscular voice

that told us he had to go to the moon, soon.

     Between sets I approached him with a request

and waited as he told a young woman drummer

     who later became a jazz prodigy at eighteen

about the old days of Bird and Diz on 52nd Street.

     His new band members didn't know the song I

asked for but Rahsaan fit it somehow in the middle

     of another.  He left earth a month later.

And in Central Park on Sundays everyone had an act--

     furious magicians and dreamy steel drum players

whose music whispered, "We are not here."

The park was haunted by those who

     had no place to be.  An army deserter

who said he lived in the park a year now

     showed me his secret, spindly tree

where a large green parrot perched. I met

     a gray-haired woman who might have been

a former actress or aristocrat.  She spent hours

     in the travel section of the library

looking for a country to spend her exile in,

     and we had tea one afternoon

in a dusty shop on 8th Avenue where

     she fell asleep in the warm sun.

My job was unraveling as I missed days

     and kept the change when the boss

sent me out for supplies.  In Joan Crawford week

     I brought apple pies and foreign papers

back to my room and watched the old movies and 

     heard muffled, desperate words through the walls.

It seemed you could disappear in New York

     without being noticed but when I went back to work

I was fired.  So I stood in Times Square

     where ragged chess masters played

as if it were their last game and

     I considered my options.  Hanging low

in the sky was a huge, overstuffed, pale

     circle.  You couldn't tell if it was

a sun or a moon.