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East side, west side,
All around the town,
The tots sang "Ring-a-Rosie,"
"London Bridge is Falling Down."
Boys and girls together,
Me and Mamie O'Rourke,
Tripped the light fantastic,
On the sidewalks of New York.
-Old NYC song
"We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry...
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
THE LAST WALTZ
FIELD TRIP TO NYC
A train, C train, D train,
Broadway line, 8th avenue,
6th Avenue, the Lex,
red light, green light,
Don't Walk, Walk,
MoMA, the Met, the Village,
Chinatown, Little Italy,
Zoo time, pizza time, falafel
time, Central Park promenading time,
Empire State perching time
Pale Male watching time (so what did he and Lola
make of us?), essential "where-the-hell-
are we? time, show time, Ground Zero
our hearts-are-in-that-hole
time, and of course the
"we got a ticket to ride
time (oh, Imagine!), wandering
the streets of New York City, wandering
into St. Patrick's Easter service
resurrection, wandering though West-Side
Passover exodus in search of a Promised
Land not called the
Hard Rock Cafe, 10 pm, Sunday, the endless
walking, the pavement rolling out
beneath us, as much as we needed, past
Picasso, Braque, Monet, Munch,
past giant meteors (trying desperately
to contain our own gravitational fields),
past dinosaurs, past mummies,
past grizzlies, past diorama moonlit wolves
running through the
dreams of one little boy from
the Bronx,
all happening here under Grand
Central's big sky, sliding through harbor
darkness toward Staten Island's mystic
slip, the Brookline Bridge, the George Washington,
decked out in their diamond
strands, the city of dreams ablaze
before us, dreaming of
the right subway stops, of weather like this
forever, of nipple piercings
(apparently), of sofas appearing like
visions on naked SoHo streets, here the city that
never sleeps, here two sleepless floors
in the 57th Street-Midtown
Holiday Inn, and then it was over,
hungry, tired, thirsty, sitting
on a bus speeding us home, sleeping,
talking, worrying, but there
would be no Rein's Deli for these weary
pilgrims, no corned beef with a side
of potato salad and sour pickle,
only an exhausted driver fighting to
stay awake, and mostly succeeding,
before we arrived to depart
back to our lives.
Finis.
April 16-20, 2006