as I walked along Forty-Second Street
directly across from Bryant Park,
I saw the back of the New York Public Library;
I stood a minute in the thin Spring sunlight and looked at it.
It represented memories,
more mine than that of streets
or persecuted love,
memories of my first days,
of Jack Kerouac and Kendra Jean.
It has exactly the same shadows
that used to fall on my face
on the mornings I would take the rumbler there,
then leave behind on the bus to Union Square,
where I would write all afternoon,
until a browse at the dying Virgin Megastore
and an early dinner at Gray Dog Cafe.
Recording a solitary encounter
is never solitary at all,
but a glimpse of time
on the sidewalk of the city
where I had come to live in my twenties
and spent the rest of my life.
Even in perpetual transit,
a displaced person, always on provisional ground,
when writing about New York City,
I must describe it as home in present-tense,
with the glories of disaster, including love,
in every stanza, every stroke of the brush.