Pink-and-Creamy Fantasies on St. Mark's Place

Is memory the measure of a life?
Enough of it perhaps to give some cognitive
authority to say what this, and you, were then –
and that you’ve therefore got some proof
of knowing what some facts were, when.

But when I pass these twenty-something’s
on St. Mark’s Place in their transient
alluring child-flesh and see them mesh with
their surroundings in a living threshold
to oblivion, it is the certainty of the oblivion

that takes. Fleeting urgencies and hungers
merely quake. Passion is an agency of making
something happen but most raging tidal seas
of it occur somewhere beyond our reckoning:
experiences alter but they do so like

a dye taints cloth: we are the blue and green
and purple it betroths us to – we are otherwise
a loss. Those youthful bodies and their softness
drain a distant melody: one part of some
attenuated and elusive strain which must

and will defeat the brain. Momentariness is not
a wagon to which you can hitch your heart
or résumé. All those pink-and-creamy
fantasies on St. Mark’s Place have gone away –
astray – were only barely here today.


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