New Year’s Poem

Times Square, 1976 / Photo by Russell C. Smith

The New Year is crawling around the corner of my mind.

I’m listening to someone turn a page in a book, three thousand miles away.

America is calling, but the line is busy.

Remembering listening to Kind of Blue on the stereo,

in my girlfriend’s Upper West Side apartment,

and writing about growing up in Florida.

Surrounded by endless bookcases jammed full of books

stretching out into infinity, eating egg salad sandwiches on the fire escape,

and walking across Central Park with the Early Watch

at half past midnight and feeling glad to be where I was in the universe.

A couple of weeks from now – bus station, airport, takeoff, land.

The telephone rings. I’m mistaken for a radio station, as usual.

Sometimes I play along and take a song request.

Out the front window, clouds are moving counterclockwise,

and some seem to be just missing getting snagged on tree branches.

Good to be reminded of beauteous living world stuff.

The tribe of artists who live in my Hell’s Kitchen tenement building stay up late

playing bongo drums and electric keyboards, or singing English folk songs

from long ago flavored with a modern lilt, or painting landscapes spilling out of

brushes, out past edges of canvases, entire whirling worlds flowing directly from their

minds, or listening to writers clacking away on typewriters two floors down late into

the night, and there’s one artist who continues chipping on a massive stone sculpture

and singing in a Brazilian accent to the doves living in his walls.

Long after midnight several of us up-all-nighters go upstairs to the rooftop

and drink bottles of red wine and take in the multi-colored wonder of the

lit-up Empire State Building glowing dreamily below starlight and cloud cover,

on the first day of the New Year.