STORYTELLER IN TIMES SQUARE
With Linda Sussman, 9 August 2002


On the night before the play began,
The story Ovid told in Metamorphoses,
We strolled the half-hour in Times Square,
Beneath tall buildings where convergent streets
Opened in a spoon-shaped gap.
Crowds swarmed everywhere ---
All the living poured into these streets
To learn transactions of the air,
From souls to bodies, from air to ground,
And back to neon throbbing atmosphere---
All exchanges are now commercialized,
With bodies and souls undergoing
The transforming traffic of the financial,
With the compound interest from the old
Persisting, multiplying and potential.
Yet, curiously enough,
Bright legends still cash up undisguised,
Like the giraffe’s head, floating in the dark
Above the Toys-R-Us, streaming
Pure liquid longing from its eyes --
---- Canyoned advertisements,
Disgorged in steel, concrete, air and light,
To thousands under the pulsating signs
Of their garish electrified and spouting hulks,
As if the terrible lizards had come down
To suck the last geysers of the Carboniferous . . .
We hurry on.
Perhaps to come---
This saurian luxury will be tamed by vigilance
That first has tamed the beast within----
For you turned, and with a dwelling look,
Said---“All this, what it means to be aware,
I feel I’m kind of in a trance. . .
My senses cannot advertise – all this!”
And I too spun in all this circumstance,
But watched you standing and unwinding
Clues of thousands of threads, gesturing,---
“All these people and their stories, here!”
To unbewitch old Chaos from her ancient stare,
And free Perseus from stumbling in his fear.

2.

Cave paintings, Dordogne:
Every muscular tension shone
Against fire below ground;
Sinew, horn, hoof, and gut,
All the swallowing followed
Whole and carefully walled
In pigment, paint, and juice of nut;
What you need ranges in the brush.
Steadying need strengthens dart;
Hunger drives each brush-stroke.
The prey that runs above was art
Before empty innards filled.

3.

Energy in economy translates into money,
As money into selling, as selling into buying,
Of cars and houses and things to fill them in
With easy credit, mounting debt,
Mortgages cheaply bought and steeply rising,
Metamorphoses of energy, source and all,
From marshes filled with peat and slime,
From whence came Oil.

Black Gold,
Richer, blacker, than any heart-of-dark,
A magical El Dorado Negro,
Rainbow bridge and Scarlet Woman,
She who holds a book with secret script
Where all may read and add their line or two. . .

But here the storyteller pauses and is unsure.
“There is a square in time’s tapestry,
Cut out by some marauding host.
Is this the ghost of the old and singing unicorn,
The one captured on the tapestried wall,
But now removed, no longer there? Lost,
Head bent down and wounded mortally? . . . “

4.

As a child you played at cowboys
And Indians with the best of them;
Until the sun sloped into the westering sky
And your companions left, one by one,
To go to school, to marry, or to die.
In those last sunsets of childhood
Great wild horses are rounded into pens,
And flame-like clouds trim sail, sail by.
There is a tinge to everything that passes,
And they go, not face-to-face, not looking,
The sun sometimes glinting off their glasses.

5.

When I first came to see you,
We walked into Lower Manhattan
Where the World Trade Center had once been.
“It looks now much like any building project,”
You said, “The site does not reveal
What once happened here… except for these,”
And we turned towards St. Paul’s Church,
Its railings hung with remembrances:
Drawings, poems, photos, clothes, and shoes,
A variety of all the miscellanies of the world,
Of child and man and animal too.
We circled round the upheaved ground
Shuttered by a running wall, where spy-holes
Opened for people to look on wreckage---
To see, but not to see too much.
Perhaps because there’s so much to see
From any window that looks out on our age,
We’d rather that it keep to small, the aperture,
And not let words go running after vision,
To outrun and overtake it before the end.
But what vision and what end?

We Americans did first
Conceive the soul’s language as a commerce,
And we celebrated ever after that new learning,
Building many towers to commemorate the thought—
Many buildings before and since these two were struck.
So, is their striking-down the blow of justice
Aimed at haughty wealth, the richest empire---
The warning of a warning against all this?
Let us not be haughty with the truth, but walk
Around it quietly as a graveyard where many lie.
We did, perhaps, take too much pride in commerce—
A case of words overtaking vision, and eye-holes
Clouded by self-success. The difference
Between the power to act and an act of power
Is as thin as the thread of conscience
That upholds the love of liberty and law.
To know this difference is the true America.

No, Calvin Coolidge,
The business of America is not business---
Rather, business belongs to that world soul
That longs to make an America of the world—
And this thought walks all the way to the middle
Of the danger, into the very needle’s eye.
Let us thread our way with care, holding
To our slender truth that we must carry through,
And not wax it up for slick dishonest passage.
From the soul of the world America was begotten,
And if we made ourselves greatly after that,
Recall what the world gave to us.
Let us love
The world in all its ways. In patient work
And patient days, let us love and remember
The world is ours because we belong to it---
As those who died belonged to us, and dying,
Want us to remember them and truth.


6.

Emerged from subway cave we joined
Our thronging kind on the streets of light.
The tale-told shadows were singing at our back,
Those story-creatures we saw living in the fire.
The vision sharpened us for going out.
I saw New York through you, Storyteller,
This new surge of an old adventure,
While on mountains in America and the world
Signals from observatories travel through the sky
Looking for the beams, some galaxy, a star,
To tell us why we came and who we are.