Classic Poem

On the Uptown shore, a woman in blue dress and open toed sandals
hugged a woman in green dress and open toed sandals, green

almost crying, blue touching the brown face of green where the tears
almost were, and then they kissed, not sexually though on the lips,

and tenderly, the wrist of blue crossing the wrist of green
as they cupped each other's face, and turned, and these sisters

I would guess, these atoms in the city, looked across the tunnel
of heat to the Downtown side, and held hands while the turnstiles

revolved and sang their electronic beeps, and a vested man
paced and stared at his cell phone, shouting motherfucker

motherfucker motherfucker like a pulse, and a woman
with tornadoed hair, with parchment skin, vised her head

between her hands and rocked on a bench painted with an ad
for lawyers, and reached down and put a finger into the spaghetti

she'd just thrown up, and the bibles of racing forms
were being marked, and stilettos were clicking the dance

of waiting, and the two women didn't move until the wind
of a train arrived to swallow them, and I wanted to believe

we are noble, just like the rat stopping on a scrap of the Times
beside the tracks as if to read, to step into the fine print

of consciousness, and the #6 came and I got on and stared
at every face hiding inside its eyes, at each face that wanted

to go home, and I got off at 33rd because I had nowhere to be,
and a voice going by said the sun didn't set that night

in Scotland, and there was the sun just setting, and the day
being absolved, and I imagined the two women getting off

their train at the other end of an island, and walking up
into the genesis of night, and touching cheeks before parting.