memory & desire

Extraordinary NYC: Odds and Ends

Public Transportation
- by Elaine Sexton -

She is perfectly ordinary, a cashmere scarf
snugly wrapped around her neck. She is
a middle age that is crisp, appealing in New York.
She is a brain surgeon or a designer of blowdryers.
I know this because I am in her skin this morning
riding the bus, happy to be not young, happy to be
thrilled that it is cold and I have a warm hat on.
Everyone is someone other than you think
under her skin. The driver does not have
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his metal
lunchbox. He has caviar left over from New Year's
and a love note from his mistress, whom he just left
on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street.
When she steps off his bus to take over the wheel
of the crosstown No. 8, she knows she is anything
but ordinary. She climbs under the safety bar
and straps the belt on over her seat. She lets
the old lady who is rich but looks poor take her time
getting on. She lets the mugger who looks like
a parish priest help her. She waits as we sit, quiet
in our private, gorgeous lives.

From Sleuth by Elaine Sexton, New Issues Press, 2003

Perfume in a Poem: In a Station of the Metro

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

- by Ezra Pound -

From Poetry, April 1913.  Online text via Poetry Foundation.  The current spacing of the text is from a later modification of the poem by Pound, published first in June 1913, and later in Pound's Gaudier-Brzeska: a Memoir, 1916.

beauty in the city

Human Beauty
- by Albert Goldbarth -

If you write a poem about love ...
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death ...

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

From The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. www.graywolfpress.org
Source: Poetry (May 2004). Electronic Text: Poetry Foundation