Classic Poem

I imagine you peering out
through the showpane at Doc Platt's drugstore
at rain on the Post Road — plumes
of spray behind every tire, wipers
admonishing each other
from indignant windshields — a day
to be indoors of, and so
easing the curse of chrome,
formica and fluorescence. They
are dry anyhow; some human
comfort in that. And quieter
also, the quick-lunch crowd —
realtors, the red-haired
lady from the boutique,
the decorator with his blue poodle,
the insurance man and the lawyers —
back in their rain-caves, and no
swarm of junior-high kids heisting
candy and comic books half
the afternoon for the price of a coke.
They've been rained out.

A day to go back, in some corner
among the condoms and pills and pestles,
to your History and Heidigger.
Do you read them still?
Have you found anything?

Do you remember anything? —
Like fighting whoever passed May Bell's house,
regardless of size, because May
was your girl (though she never knew it);
and how we tangled there once and rolled
in the street till umbrella'd apart
by an elderly pacifist?
Or how, though you'd never owned skates,
and had to be towed to the cage,
you caught every puck drilled at you
and held runty Rye Neck High
two years at the top of the league?

And your buddies — Poopie and Bronzo —
the three of you yokking it up —
in the shop and the locker room ...
Little dark violent guys,
lonely guys mostly,
short on the cars and the clothes
and the girls, clowning them out ...

Is it lonely now, sitting there
at the vinyl and tranquilized
stimulated shampooed bubble-bathed lubricated
vibrated vaporized vitaminized
deodorized medicated mentholated
cream-pie-and-coke- and porn-fed
heart of ( " what-this-place-needs-
is-a-clean-bomb " ) America, rain
beating on the show window?

" Yogi " we called you — after
the ballplayer, not the saint.
But maybe you'd have an answer
by now, if you're Yogi yet —
and there are any, past what is
is, and what aint aint.