by Phillip Schultz

My first day in New York City
I found a sweet pad on Jane Street.
It was spring, everyone was hurrying
somewhere tremendous, bursting
with the most eclectic appetites.
In all those buildings all those windows
hosting the most magical schemes . . .
that’s why it was impossible to sleep.
I had to get up, but my feet struck
to the floor the super shellacked
the day before.  Across the courtyard
a beautiful woman stood watching me.
Naked, I tried to peel free
as she continued smiling.  It was 4 a.m.,
I was thirty-one, cold, and squeezed
by every kind of vulnerability,
while she owned cheekbones big
as Hermes’ wings, emerald eyes
that could vanquish all tyranny,
armies of self-pity—that saw
exactly who I was: someone
who hastened slowly, sought
the voluptuousness of grief,
desired to be far away, teetering
on the edge of calamity.  And now,
here he stood, the naked man,
sighing in the dark, deep
in the spring of 1976,
his first night in the big city,
everything just beginning, again,
stuck in a sticky sliver
of fleeting improbability.

—from Failure