The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day,
yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19
in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to
dinner
and I don’t know the people who
will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning
to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted
and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see
what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name
Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance
for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get
a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard
although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmong
Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le
Balcon or Les Negres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick
with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep
with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into
the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle
of Strega and
then I go back where I came from
to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld
Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises
and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST
with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and
thinking of
leaning on the john door in the
5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along
the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and
I stopped breathing