From All this travelling around and I’ve learned
Nothing less obvious than this: that each
Piece of the world has something missing.
Home again, I have forgotten the stops of the trains,
My friends’ phone numbers. I haven’t even the heart
To take the maps out, to say, “Here I have been,
Here and here.” I want to explain that there
Can be no adequate descriptions, but you will think
I mean the differences are insurmountable,
When it is this vast sameness over everything
I cannot name, the thing you wait for
And do not believe in when it’s come and gone,
The words that will not stand still
Long enough for you to take a picture.

My friend asks questions and I answer.
He says he read the Metropolitan Life
Building is based on something Italian.
I look at it and shrug. “Not that I know.”
And then I see the campanile of San Marco,
Squat, granite, white instead of red.
It will become my personal comfort
In the skyline, one of those public things
You have no right to but you say you own.

If Jacob had rested in New York, he
Would have seen angels on elevators,
And St. Mark, though an insurance salesman,
Would certainly have witnessed miracles.

I don’t necessarily have to see
An angel, I just want to see some wings,
Even a flash of them, gliding, moving
Up and out, a balloon some child
Has let go of, smaller and smaller in
The sky, only wings, definite, white wings.

From the No. 7 train out to Queens,
A chance glimpse of the Unisphere brings
The future in its purest form, the whole
World connected by picture telephones
And cars that look like earthbound rocketships.
Odd that they should have left the silver globe
Still standing there, now the children it was
Built for have all grown. The space between the
Continents seems eerie now, foreboding,
And the dazzling modern sculpture weirdly
Archaic, almost shocking, like the face
Of a great movie star no longer young.

Who would have thought that people would reject
The picture telephone, the moving sidewalk,
That I would come home from all my travels
To New Jersey, to settle for a bit
Of quiet and some green, and the moment
On the hill before the Lincoln Tunnel
When I really do possess something extraordinary.
Loyal, I pick out my Metropolitan Life,
At night drenched in a white light almost blue.
Who can know that by day it is not brick
And red and surrounded by a great piazza
Opening on water, that, in the huge
White space we cannot see, there is no thick
Flock of cooing pigeons, taking off, alighting,
In a constant, dreamy fluttering of wings.