Poetry in America

Gerard Manley Hopkins on the 6 Train

39 gerarD Manley hopkins on the 6 train I would have lived more fully if I’d memorized more verse, wrote the dying Richard Rorty—pragmatist to the end—as I would have lived more fully if I’d made more close friends. Just married, 1986, typing labels for art slides, which by now must all be digitized, in a basement of the Doris Duke mansion, 5th Ave. and 78th, I committed a poem each week, hopeful and afraid Galway Kinnell would call on me to recite for the workshop. That day—Margaret are you grieving—I raced to Lexington, late, leapt down the steps as a graffitied 6 rumbled into the station. Of course the doors before me didn’t open, so I leapt to the next, slipped between their closing, and snaked through the crowd as we pulled from the platform. Only then I looked back: empty benches and an unmistakable continent of fresh blood on the floor of the closed car. No one spoke as we tunneled under the East Side with whatever had happened sealed up behind us, but someone must have met my eyes in irony or solidarity as New Yorkers do—as the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder—I got out at Astor Place like any other day, climbed into clear September air and, still rehearsing that verse, strode past the parking lot (now luxury apartments) where sidewalk vendors hawked books, clothes, housewares, heroin—worlds of wanwood leafmeal—this was before Giuliani 40 cleaned up the City. Naturally I was called to recite that night—the blight man was born for— and must have in some forgettable way. Alive but alone now, I wonder if that poet priest of long ago would make my story close so tightly, too: it is everything and just myself I mourn for. ...