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June Fourth
Today as I ride down Twenty-fifth Street I smell honeysuckle rising from Shell and Victor Balata and K-Diner. The goddess of sweet memory is there staggering over fruit and drinking old blossoms. A man in white socks and a blue T-shirt is sitting on the grass outside Bethlehem Steel eating lunch and dreaming. Before he walks back inside he will be changed. He will remember when he stands again under the dirty windows a moment of great misgiving and puzzlement just before sweetness ruined him and thinking tore him apart. He will remember lying on his left elbow studying the sky, and the loss he felt, and the sudden freedom, the mixture of pain and pleasure-terror and hope- what he calls "honeysuckle".