You know how it is… You find something you did a long time ago, what seems like a lifetime ago, and you try to fill in the details around what you find so you can remember exactly why you made whatever it is you’ve come across in this new time, this new place.  That happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I was thumbing through a notebook of scribblings from that earlier time.  It was 1985 and I was in New York City… Manhattan… Midtown… I had left the University Club and was on my way to catch a train, which I climbed aboard a little later; and on the two-hour ride I wrote a poem about what I had seen and what I had heard.  A dozen times I’ve reread the lines written in long-hand script that I recognize as mine, and I remember the afternoon and wonder if the words I wrote are letting me see and hear again what actually happened, or have the thirty intervening years of experience between then and now and the impulse to create something as I passed the time on the train that Thursday afternoon changed the experience into something else.  Now...reading what I wrote then, I can see and smell New York on a late spring mid-afternoon… a pretzel vender… holding a knife… another man afraid to slip beyond the implied boundary the man with a knife had established… people gathered around… one policeman on foot joined by six others getting out of two squad cars.  

I’ll never know what really happened before I got to that street corner or what happened to any of the people after I left it… but I find myself wishing I knew.

unless it get use for hotdogs or pretzels

the knife mighty real all right

catchin the sun  

an finally catching attention of a foot cop

the crowd an all attractin attention

so he run like hell

talkin all the time into his walkie talkie

by the time he get there the siren sound

an the crowd take one step back

but only one step

nobody leave the scene

not wantin to miss it if somebody get cut

the guy with the knife circling now

like in the movies holding his left han up

knife held steady in the right han

and he say who you gonna kill bastard

and the cop he get there an break the circle

stand back hisself near the crowd

tryin to stay cool

breath coming quick

wonderin I think if he want to draw his gun

but he just place his han on it

and raise the other han up

and the pretzel guy

from India maybe

wide moustache on a brown face

ain’t black

standin there with the knife and raised han

and the guy with killin on his mind having second thoughts

backin up but there ain’t no opening in the crowd

the squad car squeal to a stop

an two other cops jump out drawing guns

and now the first cop jerk his gun out

and they stand there trying to figure out who all to aim at

so they turn to the guy with the knife

and he say whoa I’m innocent here

I’m just keepin this guy in line til you come

and the guy who was yelling about killin turn his palms up

and shrug his shoulders and raise his eye brows

like to say what the hell

this guy just go crazy an draw the knife

the cops put the handcuffs on the pretzel guy

after he drop the knife and see the situation

an start tryin to explain

but there ain’t nobody else threatenin

so the cops take him away

his pretzel cart just standin there smokin.