“It’s not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.”

You must get drunk. That’s it: your sole imperative. To immunize yourself from the backbreaking, body-bending burdens of time, you must get drunk and stay that way.

After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a silver two-franc piece he inspected closely. I wondered about this odd distribution of coins.

In retrospect it was romantic to be the lonely American recovering from 
        pneumonia, living in a hotel room with a typewriter
        and a sink in a Left Bank hotel in a gray Paris winter.

Do you have a favorite time of day? Favorite weather?
Tell me about your writing process.
Is that so? I would never have guessed.

They're calling old people seniors
short for senior citizens but it's as though
they're still in college and can look forward

The first time I met Wittgenstein, I was
late. “The traffic was murder,” I explained.
He spent the next forty-five minutes

Poetry is to jazz
as literature is to music
as Lake Como is to the Arno River

I never liked the World Trade Center.
When it went up I talked it down
as did many other New Yorkers.

The boy had a group of freckle-faced friends
Who lived nearby. He gave them names, taught them games.
They loved him. He had a sweet nature, sang show tunes

It had taken him long enough but now
He was an American. The years of effort had paid off.
He knew all about the pennant races and the Academy Awards

The happiest moment in a woman’s life
Is when she hears the rum of her lover’s key
In the lock, and pretends to be asleep

She went to his head like a double martini at a bar
Where gangsters gather after a hit. She wanted his baby.
They sat at a corner table, quarreling about money,

No gentle way of breaking the news: you turn on the TV
And see the rocket’s red glare: the capsule explodes,
The astronauts tumble down, and the anchorpeople

I walk into the men’s room at LaGuardia Airport
And the guy standing next to me zipping his fly
Has been dead for thirteen years. I know because
He was one of my professors in graduate school.

The film begins in Venice
As conceived by the dreamer before
He begins his journey, which ends

But on the screen where your real life is happening
It is always 1938, you are always dancing

The question is not how like the animals we are
But how we got that way. We laugh, for what is a suicide note

But the epitaph of an emotion? Few of us die out in the open;

The stars have gone north, abandoning the city
For this wilderness that is mine, if only for a time,
Long enough to learn the language of the leaves before

Sir Winston Churchill advised against suicide
“Especially when you may live to regret it.”
After an endless faculty meeting at Princeton,

“Work shall set you free:” a sensible sentiment:
Marx would agree: Freud would give his assent:
Yet take those words and put them on a sign

And if the mortally wounded warrior revives, and if
      his after-dinner pipe leads the drowsy sinner
to cast a long loving look at the cello in the corner

Unable to distinguish between flying and falling
With a feeling of splendid contempt and with a strange loving longing 
In my eyes, I look up at the helicopter that was lately  my home 

As a boy (who destroyed his eyesight
Reading in the dark by flashlight)
I went to the library

In my younger and more existential days, the most innocuous of phrases—the ubiquitous “how are you,” for example—would cause rockets of nausea to crash in my belly. There was a time, to be sure, when I could answer “fine” with the best of them. Daily vomiting rapidly cured me of that. 

I.  In the sixth grade 
          Eisenhower to go down to South America 
          And Mrs. Goldman to write on the board, 

And then they are there all of the people depressed 
Into tattoos or footprints or names plastered 
Or carved into wood or wall