A Sunday Morning Fifth Avenue Walk

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I’m on a 22-block 

Fall escalator ride

Moving with childhood velocity

The sky is Tiffany blue

Which makes everyone feel

As prosperous as a happy ending

My heart is that

balloon

Which floats

over the Strand Bookstore kiosk

with its novel-excavating archeologists

As the Agnes de Mille of the wind  

Shows it how to do

the Red Maple Leaf rag

As I am enveloped by

the swarm of Columbuses

discovering America

The fanny pack of wolves

The sneaker hoofed stampede

The unicorn-fed girl in her multicolored finery

The Mickey Mouse rat race

The merry prankster dogs who prance like ponies

as their wagtails

keep time like metronomes

The heads down flock, pray to their phones

Lourdes knows why

As I am passed by

The Pashminas

The Cashmeres

The Good Wool Hunters

The street-sleeping drifter

Who is being transported back

To his full belly past

A cardboard of hand-scrawled commandments appears:

A hastily written message from God

Who has left explicit instructions as to how to lead a better, more purposeful life

As I dodge

The hand-holding strollers

and

The hands-pushing strollers

With their acrobatic babies

The Nicotine agers

The stogie bench puffer

Who exhales like city steam

The Central Park trees that blush like schoolgirls

The skinny man who is escorting his mummified

Viola on wheels

Like he’s showing it the door
And then

Suddenly.

There she is

The friendly-faced older woman

Who rate of exchanges a smile with me

Which is a currency that we will both take

to our night graves

When life will deliver

The eulogy of memory

Which arrives more frequently 

during the sunset years

Only to be born again

As the sun rises and expands

Like freshly baked sky bread

At the grand summit of

the dream waltz

that I danced with the friendly-faced her

which ended

with a V-J Day Times Square sailor kiss

As she tucks a folded message into

the flaps of my heart

Which will open

From time to time

Whenever I long for that goodbye.

 

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