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A Long Walk on a Weekday Afternoon
June 2001

The NEW YORK CITY FIRE MUSEUM names
the men who died on ladders, and the men
who invented the modern system of volunteers.
Throughout the 1700s, porcelain
"fire marks," attached to certain structures,
meant blazes extinguished there would bring a reward.

Such public space: sun bangs on every sill
at Spring and Van Dam, at Charles and Greenwich Streets.
Privately, you'd live there if you could.

Defunct refrigerators form a row
on the sunlit walks, their backs peeled
up and off like rusted tins of fish.

And televisions in a spell of rain
lie facedown on one stoop, their backs sheared off
so that each picture tube points up towards air,
its wires stuck out: disabled, or exposed.

The tiger-striped awning at GIRLPROPS.COM,
formerly known as SO WHAT?,
shades rhinestone rings like icing on pink cake:
"funner," a customer says
agreeably, "than the real thing," as they are.

Then comes the call you've waited for all day:
there's nothing in
him anymore, or nothing
worth the cost of the pursuit.

Two silk ties, cement-gray or dove-gray,
cling to an otherwise-empty aluminum rack,
behind thick glass: curved, sunlit, shatterproof.

Stephen Burt
Colorado Review
Summer 2002
Special Issue Going Places: Fiction, Poetry, & Essays about Travel