The Hungarian Pastry Shop & Cafe

is the only place I know in the city
where you can still see people with pen
and paper. Legal pads, spiral bound,
plain or college-ruled loose leaf, well-thumbed sheaves
of paper at every crumb-strewn table: precis,
postulations, undergraduate observations, sound
doctoral theory, a shady spot of fiction -
each hand the only one in the world
to produce such symbols, personal as finger-
prints, errant y's and flighty t's,
g's trailing their tails like apprehensive
dogs. It's a deep, low-ceilinged room, illuminated
dimly by porcelain snowdrops on the walls,
a foreign spring, ripe with words' secret burning.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

by Anne Pierson Wiese, 2007

Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

by Hart Crane, 1926

Finishing the Hat

from Sunday in the Park with George


Mademoiselles -
You and me pal -
Second bottle -
Ah, she looks for me.

Bonnet flapping -
Yapping -
Ruff!
Chicken -
Pastry -
Yes, she looks for me.  Good.

Let her look for me to tell me why she left me,
As I always knew she would.
I had thought she understood.

They have never understood,
and no reason that they should.
But if anybody could...

Finishing the hat -
How you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window,
While you finish the hat.

Mapping out a sky -
What you feel like, planning a sky.
What you feel when voices that come
Through the window
Go
Until they distance and die.
Until there's nothing but sky.

And how you're always turning back too late
From the grass or the stick
Or the dog or the light,

How the kind of woman willing to wait's
Not the kind that you want to find waiting
To return you to the night.

Dizzy from the height.
Coming from the hat.
Studying the hat.
Entering the world of the hat.

Reaching through the world of the hat
Like a window,
Back to this one from that.

Studying a face -
Stepping back to look at a face.
Leaves a little space in the way
like a window.

But to see -
It's the only way to see.

And when the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the woman who won't wait for you knows
That, however you live,
There's a part of you -
Always standing by,
Mapping out the sky.

Finishing a hat.
Starting on a hat.
Finishing a hat.
Look, I made a hat.

Where there never was a hat.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Stephen Sondheim, 1984

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grand Jatte

by George Seurat, 1886

Mandy Patinkin, as George Seurat, sings Finishing the Hat

from "Sunday in the Park with George"

Beach Glass

While you walk the water's edge,
turning over concepts
I can't envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change,
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
                                           It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty -
driftwood and shipwreck, last night's
beer cans, split oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic - with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
or touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.
                                         The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it's hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass -
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almaden and Gallo, lapis
by way of (not getting around it,
I'm afraid) Phillips'
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
of no known origin.
                                         The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel,
along with the treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed
astonishments of Chartres,
which even now are readying
for being turned over and over as gravely
and gradually as an intellect
engaged in the hazardous
redefinition of structures
no one has yet looked at.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

by Amy Clampitt, 1983

The Untold Want

The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.






- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

by Walt Whitman, 1871