Madison Square Park

Mr. President, I am today festooned in an artist's frippery;
red and white bunting on metal bars
upswept with turnbuckles and cables --
a gondola affair, mid-air, called "Seward's Bridge."
They cannot know us; we are dead bronze, fables
in a long non-sequitur
where bold conceits all flap away.

This is my favorite time of day.
No mere spin and tilt, this dawn;
it is the vastest mortal birth: innocent through the night,
briefly here, a growing light, a taste of earth, and quickly gone.
It casts a show of memory fresh-vanishing.

Here I sit amidst flowers strewn with tossings of the age.
Farragut, across the way, holds cigarettes,
is striped with paint, and smiles at the indignity.
He drifts out past the sooty towers
on ebbing tides to miss rush hours.

Squirrels as fat and tame as cats abound, dashing only at the last
from unleashed dogs, understanding them, dispersing, then,
like the consolidation of bums hunkered here breathing coffee steam
beside the wood-backed bench, and dew lifting from green slats
with the chirrup of police phones and the gathering sun.

The nation is divided still, and will be – a busy land of passion, of volition.
Here, at dawn, the air billows with hope. Consequence has not begun.
A few cars rustle in the streets and early walkers walk alone, and time is slow.
Something like peace appears, brought with the dawn,

and something else…a sign, a message shadowed in the greenery,
a pattern traced in the scuffed dirt, something to be breathed before business,
a truth impervious to lies, as new light leans across the land
and what the world will be today is passed from hand to hand.

~~~~~~~~~~

Douglas Logan

Comments

[Doug Logan]

Arch, you and T are too kind by far, dear sir. I wrote the poem in about 1980 or 81, when I was walking through the park every day to work at Dodd, Mead. So it's quite possible that I've shown it to you before. In any case, it was never published. But you may be remembering that wacky art installation on Seward's statue, too. You were in NYC at the time, playing down at CBGBs, I believe?
- DL

[Arch]

Doug -
Your poems are exquisite, a comment that T made just the night before last.
Funny, though. This one seems familiar. Is it possible it comes from the archives of your works?
In any case, here's a Richard Wilbur number I think touches you and Meliss (among others): http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15487

[Patrick Murphy]

This is an evocative poem for me. It's set at an earlier time but it seems like it could have been composed in yet another hard September in New York.

Especially timely too these lines:

The nation is divided still, and will be – a busy land of passion, of volition./
Here, at dawn, the air billows with hope. Consequence has not begun.

Coincidence? Isn't that what makes a timeless poem?