HALLOWEEN

I spend a holiday in the city by my old neighborhood.
Coming back again after years away I stay at the "Y"
In a cheap room with no TV and the place is scary.
I go cowboy and the duffle knocks my hat when I lift it up.
They ask for ID.  A staff guy with a bounce in his walk
Points and eyeballs for me to watch my stuff.

I pick a low room to get a better feel of the street.
When I let myself in it's not made up and the air
Has the kind of perfume they put in disinfectant.
There's a pinup of Manet's boy piper in a military outfit
And an Easter prayer to Jesus with two soldiers in helmets
Kneeling at him. I put up the shade and open the window.

In a deep cavern horns and motors make a river of noise
With swirls and eddies. The rhythm is set by automatic signals.
From down here the sky is too far off to see.
Brakes squeal and hiss at you. There's a rough spot
And turbulence from sirens and blinking lights.
Volume and pitch vary with time and distance.

Pigeons on the cornice preen themselves in staccato
With sudden twists and pauses. Below them a line
At immigration waits to get in holding manila envelopes.
A bright light glares at them and the shadows are hard.
The dominant one with a puffy throat drives off the other.
Paint peels on the rain gutters with classical decorations.

I get off the elevator with a young guy in a team jacket.
The style is decco and floor buttons are mismatched or broken.
When he opens his mouth to speak to the room clerk
The sound that comes out of it is from another world.
A girl at the phone with long hair and a nice voice
Turns around with a gorilla face on her.

I step out for coffee and black workers in yellow hardhats
Straddle the top of the automat and knock it apart brick
By brick. The jazz bar downstairs gets out just in time.
Where they smash it terra cotta is red under the pastel.
It's narrow and dark beneath the scaffolding with posters.
Next day just a steel skeleton sticks up over the rubble.

I take a subway to the West Side. From a signcard overhead
The ghost of Langston Hughes comes back to speak of life
'N' good lovin'.  Up here it's raw like a frontier.
On the street I pass a kid with a white face.
Some poets hang out in the corner of a cafe
And they turn the sound system down to let them hear.

One of them recites a long poem about power in America
Beginning with the Conquest. A lot of her friends
Live in refrigerator boxes around Columbus Circle.
She loses her job at Kenyon on account of a bleeding heart.
The King of Spades reads from his book. A medicine doctor
Finds the erotic tissues in him swell with tainted fluid.

I go by Lincoln Center where the opera is sold out
And a whitehaired crowd steps off the Carousel
Looking for their bus. A girl sits crosslegged at the fountain
And people from all over take bad pictures of it.
A virgin she marries a macho guy in an old Italian movie
And first thing he takes it out on her in a bloodsoaked bed.

When it gets dark some of them play trick or treat with you
So I go back by cab. Someone suspicious comes in
Just ahead of me and gets hollered at by security.
I take a leak in the public toilet looking out for kooks.
The safe way is avoid eye contact keep an even pace clatter
Hard with your shoes and make as much noise as you can.

New York 10/31/94