The winter sun blinded, glass buildings
repeated the sky and all the endless traffic
trailed plumes of exhaust, white and vanishing.
I’d come out of the store wearing my new coat,
the old one in a box beneath my arm,
when I felt a hand on me.
He was old and white haired. ‘I’ll pay
you,’ he said. ‘I’ve got furniture to move.
I can’t do it myself.’ Around us
the topcoated businessmen flew about
like leaves and pigeons strutted in the gutters.
I followed him south and east,
out of the glittery district of mirrors,
toward the fleabag hotels by the licorice factory.
The air was camphorous, our breaths flagged out
and sailed away. From a street of dead cars
he lead me into a hall, smoke-dark
and redolent of licorice and urine.
Could I really not have known
what he wanted, there in the cold
and filth of that empty room,
when he turned to me and said nothing
but knelt as though to beg, his spotted hands
shivering? In that world unmade of glass
where the sun cannot shine, I knew. In that street,
that building, that brutal hall,
that room in which I gave away
what I had no need for.