On a Bench in Washington Square

What has the world got to do with you?
What is your job in the world?

You sit in your hot late-May city to view

a voluptuous chaos too hurled

at itself to be taken in, more than a touch –

except by a new crop of twenty-year-olds

for whom nothing, it seems, is too much.

You glimpse a bare torso, soft folds

of worn shorts: a beautiful boy on a bike.

You haven’t a question to answer or ask –

there’s nothing you can’t say you like.

Put up with that: perhaps that’s the task.






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