ressentiment
Today is so full, and yet
today never gets spoiled.
— TIM DLUGOS
today never gets spoiled.
— TIM DLUGOS
Some old drunk who’d been
to France recently died, left
his collection of Isherwood, John
O’Hara, tobacco-stained, grungy
with tattered invites hanging out.
I come wagging out of the train
station at 59th & nearly scream,
Just the books I need!
I take my own sense of
abundance down
into the subway, the
F, Second Ave., the
bodies strewn, the
stink of human
shit the ungodly
lights, standing, waiting
in the heat
The mother won’t repeat
for the child. If you
didn’t get it the first
time . . .
Who is that Irish novelist
he says, the one we see
in meetings in East Hampton
the train arrives & I hop
on that lesbian poet, the
one we always see around
3:30 in Kiev, having a very
late lunch I guess.
We whiz uptown to get help.
We whiz back down. This
is an old fashioned phone
call, Do you have
10 bucks, All saints’ day 1989.
I slept with her last night,
first time since August, she’s
moving so the smells of her
neighbor’s pot won’t waft
insidiously into her bedroom
anymore, Jan with his
new electric piano, Jan the
monkey-faced pot dealer who
teaches tai chi.
I went to see 17 art shows on
Saturday. 17. That’s not a lot.
Saw Tim in the hospital on Sun-
day. Thin Tim. We know he’ll
come out. He doesn’t want to
be everyone’s friend Tim who has AIDS
so we won’t let him be that.
We won’t.
We charged around in our
dungarees watching the century
approach. Another one, nicer
than this, young again, full
of conviction, naïveté, covered
with hair and sunlight, brim-
ming with time, a wave of invention . . .
I take my sense of abundance
into the subway & what do
I see? People bending reading
swaying, torn posters
waving in a song of
sickening movement.
Why don’t they think we know about
rice, racing . . . handsome woman
fiddling with her bag. We’re
the same people who met in
a disaster, but nothing hap-
pened here. You can’t call
it joy this somnolence, licking
our lips with our earphones
on. The poet got off
in the yellowing light,
the rising tile, then
Lexington Ave. Have you
gone here, did you
go there everyone wants
to know. & there’s the
EXIT. Absolutely now
I’m going & the buildings
are growing before my
eyes.