It seemed always cold then, wake up come-alive weather, but on the bus a murmuring quiet all through bland Jersey to Weehawken where it rose up to the river road that curves down to the tunnel: there, the City Glorious, like a dream from childhood of a Galactic Imperium washed in winter air, light-cleansed, the Glass City breathing in the sunlight it also owned, and a power like a steel voice humming into your ear, ‘this is for you, this is where the body goes’.
You came out of the Port Authority rushing into waves of bodies walking fast, the river you had come to swim, to slip in___ just like that____ one of them dodging, talking fast, saying look faster, see there, look, look at how the wind off the rivers reddens faces swarming across cross streets, almost running, thinking — this is the current you wanted, want, why you came.
In the flow towards uptown looking faster in the steaming windows at couples tight fit at tiny tables windows, looking at ancient women passing by in caked make-up engulfed in fur coats, into windows draped with scarves in tropical shades, at watches, jewels, chocolates, suits tender as silk, past doormen dressed like diplomats from Oz, looking, looking faster into windows arrayed with books, books, books, shoes, chairs and tables burnished to call you in, and paintings, posters of Paris, beaches, islands, and huddled blankets giving up men and women hunched on cardboard, their outstretched hands the color of rust, and everywhere the smell of broiling meat, diesel fumes, and street-stand sellers roasting peanuts, boiling hot dogs, past dog-walkers drawn forward by their menageries, surging with the river in flood with bodies talking, looking, walking fast.
The theater seats way up top stack one upon another like receding parapets, precipitous, the stage far below, but you lean forward amid bags and coats, riveting, falling faster into the trance with so many quiet animals like you.
When the lights came up, you stretched and walked into a street where taxis yellow as tigers cut open the air with their clamor, and you came into dusk among skyscrapers.
In this City most real, the empire of lookseewant, one among cries and horns, swinging in steps aside and around chanting Hare Krishnas dressed like bright shimmers in the air, and black kids in enormous red caps side-eyeing while whispering “got smoke”, “got smack”, past The Paradise, The Fantasy, Triple XXX’s, the 24-Hour Action of Nude Girls, peep shows, past pimps idling against store windows heaped with boom boxes and cameras, past cops in blue button-over coats, heads on swivels, snorting at the show, past whores arm-in-arm in tiny hot pants walking in the steam of their breath, past ruined faces, muttering, proclaiming, past faces like battering rams whose gaze strikes you like a stream of shattering glass.
Now, after the Towers and the wars, after the smash-ups and deaths, my luck holding in marriages and friends, in the quiet of birds and dogs, and luck too to have walked in mountains and along cold seas, now I remember the City Glorious lit up like galaxies, and the dark, shining rivers of its people.
I remember its incitement to move, to look, to look faster, to move now, this day, because there has never been enough time, not now, not ever.
