Saul Bennett
Walking Wall
I used to walk Wall Street nights.
Pine. Beaver. Cedar. Stone. Curl
up Pearl. Stalk the Slips. Campaign
Maiden Lane. Searching, alone, old
New Amsterdam for my kindred
beginning almost forty years ago with no job
and false prospects, looking to the dawn
of New York to glide my spirit home.
Discharged of life except for random pins
of window light, the towers dripped
on intravenous. On Front the dozing giant
coffee roasters elevated scent. West off Rector
Trinity's coffins rolled. The Automat on
Church, so sad to say, was dead till dawn. Dead, just,
my father, mother-once he took me to a steamship
office down there somewhere
near the Battery where a man he knew
heaped into my hand with a huge
"Some lucky boy!" freighter passage to Antwerp.
Then they were dead. Which was why I walked,
I suppose, to find them there, somewhere
south of Spring. I spoke to no one through
the night. Panhandlers, the few, I ignored. I adored
the old original subway stops, august terra cotta
plaques on platform walls pronouncing
each station's Edenic origin. I favored Bowling Green
for its cuddling half-moon ceiling. Very late from there
the subway rolled me home to Queens.
Crusading north in empty cars past Brooklyn Bridge
I watched for Worth Street station. Gone,
you see; you saw its tawny ghost. They'd closed it
when my parents lived. There - there,
they were, at some time, in some form. Or,
at station City Hall, abandoned after I was born.
They are down here
somewhere. I should search some more.