Someone

You watch the night like a material Slowly being crammed into a tube of rooms; It showers into gunshot, pepper, dew, As if a hand had squeezed it at one end, Is blank as innocence when daylight comes Projecting sunlit patches on the wall That fade. Too much is going on, too much Of life, you say, for you to live alone On top of an old tenement, on a train That might start off sometime, but never does. Your view is gone. Turn around, and boom!, A park appears between two fixed ideas Whose narrow aperture of sky in time Will house the slums of 1989 . . . Now New York is feigning its gray dark London winter. Invisible uptown Is out there somewhere, raining on its own. Palmed in the dusty pane, a circle bares A scene that seems reprinted from the past: A man with a dog is walking very fast Along a path among the stunted trees Of the little square below. He disappears.