for stanley kunitz
an old man with no hat and a cane in his hand is standing in the tottering rain
thinking about something a poet he once knew wrote about the dingiest bird
he ever saw, the absolute dingiest! -- and he is thinking about a river in southern
connecticut with no end to it where he lived as a child with his mother and how
the black soiled banks of that river were as near to perfect for growing eggplants
as soil can get -- but now it is new york city and he is waiting for the bus uptown,
the uptown bus doesn't stop here or maybe it is only that it is the wrong hour for
his bus -- so he stand there with the rain pouring down his scalp and shirt collar --
his white white hair is pouring into his ears and his head is filling up with poetry --
rain in his eyelashes even his valise is filling up with rain -- so much rain it spills
into his head -- so much rain it spills from the top of the valise, it pools up in his
old man tennis shoes -- and the women pass by and the men pass by and everyone
is carrying shopping bags and umbrellas and their shoulders are wet -- and yes, the
pavement glistens and the taxicabs sneak past and he is happy with everything
he sees in life -- because it is life, it is still life after all! he is not dead yet, it is good
to be standing in the rain with no hat on even if he has to use a cane -- and a bus
comes and the bus doors open and the bus doors close and it is not his bus again
and he remembers something thoreau wrote about rivers -- how they take everything
with them how they leave everything behind -- maybe it wasn't thoreau does that
really matter? -- and the blood and fur of centuries goes past and a woman goes past --
one woman in particular, he admires her -- the way she walks the way she dresses --
she is wearing a fur-lined overcoat which comes all the way down to her ankles --
she is wearing rubber galoshes -- he wants to scoop her up just scoop her up
and take her away only because he likes the squeaking noise she makes when
she walks past -- the kind of noise you might make if you were to take the palm
of your hand if you were to stroke the smooth purple skin of an eggplant in the rain
�2007 by George Wallace
