Riverside Drive

How little it takes to lose everything.

Think of it: a winter sunrise, one blade of it, cold

on your eyes like the angel's sword on Adam's shoulder.

Memory, like this city easing into the fog,

a blurring of any boundaries, New Year's Day

dark as usual, hours that we'd rather sleep off

and then wake only to a Christmas tree's

pine-scented, glass-bulb fire.

Think of it: how hard to recognize the bare earth

as our inheritance again, quiet now

as if after war, the rosebush a skeleton

that shook off its white flesh of petals

to show its claws.

But isn't this what we wanted?

I like this storm. The sky exhaling black smoke.

Frightened birches. Time turned to water

and the clean frost on our windows

and bringing up our high color.

Didn't we want to walk past the faded Beaux-Arts glory

of buildings with their arches and turrets

as complex and shadowed as the mind's apartments,

where the gloom gathers inside gates

under the stone nymphs and nameplates?

All the way to what we conceive to be endings,

past the cathedral tower looking over the ruins

of autumn and the steep drop to the river

we're skirting, taking it all in, unquestioning,

as a mirror believes.

A walk to nowhere-or the edge of it.

A day-like the calendar left out, the dull hour

and memory's grisaille.

I can take it or leave it alone.

Nothing will happen if I look down at the river,

or at the lights coming on in buildings like isolate

dead stars. I can raise my eyes to the, hills of New Jersey,

the elegant properties of Broadway,

but I know no help will come.

So night comes, with a little chill the lights and river

get, like I do;

and to think that what we see is less than the sum

we'd like is our cold health, the gentle gloom of this place,

its darkened grace as it stands on the edge of the water

that is like the edge of time, the growing night

that is like the end of the world

and where you start.