Another New York Play

Let’s do a little justice
to this cold, occasionally
rainy day – let’s like the way-
station it gives imagination –
love its stubbornness and its
fragility – enthrall ourselves
with its peculiar fence between

the rest of everything and us –
exhort the organs of our senses –
vision, hearing, smell – to tell us
if its enterprise is swelling
to some peak or on the very
brink of dissipating into
something else. We are

a hundred years ago today –
right at the eve of the provocatively
strange: we are in all this
intermittent clever rain the object
and the subject of its story:
New York City in its liberally
gritty pretty glory: here, on March

the 9th, 1909, 2009, 3009, 4009:
we are the wine of clouds that
were and are to come –
precipitant, precipitous.
How lovely, nesting here!
Above, below, the rest
of everything seems far

too alien, too queer to care
about – not in this misty
city, now, that makes of doubt
another of its finest arts.
Another day, another New York
play: we stay and wait
for her to hand us out our parts.

.