Sitting in Bryant Park With You

Sitting in Bryant Park With You

Is even more fun than singing Bon Jovi
with Puerto Ricans in Old San Juan,
or faking my German through East Berlin
clubs, or even ditching out of the studio,
my vintage Fender guitar still buzzing through
the neglected amp as I dashed out
on my friend to meet you in Washington Square.
Partly because in your red summer dress
you look like a happier St. Anne
(saint of the childless), partly
because of my infatuation with you,
partly because your love of donuts,
partly because of the descending fountain,
men playing bocce, the impromptu reading room,
the elegant NYPL standing sentinel over us,
partly the secrecy of our smiles,
like we know something
they don’t.

It is hard to believe when I’m with you
there can be anything as still,
as pleasantly definitive,
as absolutely rooted when we are right
in front of it in the diffuse
4pm New York light as your ear rising
like the spire of the Chrysler Building
through the shrouds of your hair
that will cascade across my chest
like a sunset later.
Drifting back and forth
between each other like the Atlantic
Ocean reaching thirstily
for the beach at Coney Island.
And the throngs of people
seem to have no faces at all and you wonder
why in the world anyone ever put them here.

I look at you and I would rather
look at you than all the portraits
on Earth except possibly
for Henri’s “Young Girl” occasionally
and besides that’s in the Detroit Institute
of Arts which, thank God,
I’ll never have any reason to go back to,
yet you haven’t been, so maybe we can go
together the first time. And the fact
that you move so beautifully takes care
of both modernity and post-modernity
so at home I never think of the Met
or free Fridays at MoMA, or of a single
drawing of Picasso that used to wow me.
What good does researching the Cubists
do when they never got the right person
to sit across a table from them in Bryant Park
while the sun peaked, or while
they ate ice cream from a street
vendor outside the library in summer?

It seems like they were all robbed
of some divine experience
which is not going to be lost on me this time
which is why I’m writing to you about it.