Seventh Avenue - Mark Halliday

SEVENTH AVENUE

by, Mark Halliday

Late Tuesday afternoon the romantic self weaves

up Seventh Avenue amid too many lookers, too many

feelers: romance hates democracy;

how can you be so great and golden inside

if your trunk is shouldered among other trunks

block after block, block after block--

you can't help glimpsing an otherness in others

that is not just surface: they ache,

their aches ache away north and south all Tuesday

in murmurous torsos like yours . . .

What apprehension blossoms even now in Manuel

shifting steaks at the ten-foot grill of Charley O's

beneath the towering chef's hat they make him wear?

When I was twenty I'd have written

that he was only thinking of Cadillacs and sex;

now I'm afraid he's just as worried as I am

about love vs. lesser things and the point of it all.

Manuel, stay there at the sizzling grill till midnight

and then just drink or sleep, man,

don't write poems--

do me that favor. It's loud enough already

out here on Seventh Avenue with that cat's boom box

and these three giggle girls being Madonna together

and that guy hawking wind-up titans wielding laser lances.

Who's Wordsworth for any extended period on Seventh Ave?

In this pre-dusk traffic you catch the hint

that Manuel and thou if seers at all are seers only

for seconds--now the steak, taxi, buttocks, headline

and wallet resume their charismatic claim to be what counts.

Soul on Seventh is a sometime on-off quick-flip thing . . .

What I want is a poem long as Seventh Avenue

to sprinkle gold on every oppressed minority,

every young woman's subtly female hips,
every sad and suspicious American face

and the quiddity of every mud-tracked pizza shop;

proving, block after block, stanza by stanza
that I'm not just one skinny nervous pedestrian

but the one who matters because he sees and says.

I want that. The Avenue grins and says
"You want, that? How does it feel to want?"