At the lights (Les Temps)

Childcare?
Hmm, I tell her,
I’d get out
of that. 
Well, she is.
Well out.
Lost her job
& looking
for factory work
or maybe cleaning. 
                    The lights
change.  We walk
together further up
the street.
One factory doesn’t
train you for another:
it’s not an industry,
I say.  I wonder if
I’m right.  We talk
politics a bit.  (The
government has changed hands—
not good for the
childcare business.
    You don’t happen
    to own a coalmine?—
But I don’t ask her that.)
She asks about
my employment history
—bookshop, the arts.
‘Adult’ bookshop?
We laugh.  Well, for grown-ups
I tell her, but no &
I describe our specialties
She says she could have guessed
arts—you look an arty
sort of guy.  We laugh
Well I’ve been hanging round with them
a long long time.  1982?!
I was born just then.
So she’s 31.
Thirty years in one job
it’s not very usual anymore.
I tell her Yes,
I’ve hung on.
I wish her luck
with the job we
part & I go & have
coffee read there
these essays on
Frank O’Hara
—the step, prosody, thought—
not finding them
a lot of fun.  My
mood.  Read
an old letter from
Sylvia Esposito someone
I knew in Rome
the letter living
all these years in
the pages of this book
I wonder where
Sylvia is living now?
It was a new apartment
maybe she is there still.
A letter from Yumiko
evidently I placed
both letters here,
at the same time, tho
the Yumiko one is from
1998—Sylvia’s
from 02.  Time.
The David Herd article
—time, prosody
—thought.
                        I feel
a little down.  Tho
there are reasons for that
—aside from what
I was thinking a moment ago
was the reason—a
worry I put behind me
in a practiced way
What, me worry?
tired might be it:
finishing after twelve
last night.  Tired
but calm.  I never remember
when O’Hara died—
except I know he heard
the Beatles, was ‘around’ then—
tho whether he’d care
about them I don’t know—
1964?  65?  more in
to Rachmaninoff,
Poulenc—two
romantic words
for me, Frank’s—
that have terrific
pace to them, weight
             #
It all passes.
             #
Hindley Street even,
changed. 
              #
                      I like
the continental flavour of
The Boulevard—a little world,
changeless, briefly—but
prefer it here
at Tempo
—that name!—
where no comfort
is given, no
meaning, nothing.
Bleak?  I’m
up for it.  A
small bird,
near my feet,
eating crumbs.
Then we leave.