Would You Believe It?

I am no longer sixteen. Impossible, really.

That I will not again crack

sunflower seeds on the salt–bitten boardwalk

as a pink gossamer slowly alights over the dripping void

of the early morning, carrying in

its belly the muted glory of another day on Earth—

a bone that keeps washing ashore,

a child that insists on being born.

I won’t talk through the night again

with junkies dozing to the clinking cowbell of withdrawal,

a pockmarked moonface hanging over us,

as if it were peeking inside a baby carriage,

easing our loneliness; wherever I might go now,

you won’t send police cruisers after me

or watch with me seagulls throw up bits of a crab,

a shard of a dream that cuts the flesh when it releases you,

as you turn red in the face with concern over my future.

In the winter–agony of Coney Island,

where an old rabbi still blows his horn in a sad refrain—

and blue–grays settle over the blinking arcades

and wharves like a case of diphtheria—

I did not learn anything at all.

You were right, all my friends were idiots.

Tomorrow morning in line at the welfare office,

you will exchange compliments with the secretary,

boredom silvering her eyes like a moonbeam from a Bulgakov novel,

forced to look at childhood photographs

of someone she does not love. And who really wants all this misery?

Even a poet eventually tires of it. The seagulls

will not return the last piece of your dream;

they will cry for you when you no longer need them to.

Maybe it only appears this way because God lives longer than we do

in the fat velvet ropes that droop

in between immigrant mothers waiting on a ration of eggs and milk,

in the prayers we used to scatter

together at the marina like a crust of moldy bread.

We understand little of things’ abrupt end,

and even less, when they stubbornly continue,

and yet, it just so happens that whenever I stand in the enduring glow

of the Atlantic Ocean, I still believe that your life was the only thing that mattered.