New Year's Eve 1989

Up on the roof, waiting for the fireworks to begin

in warm winter rain, a moment ago I stepped

from the elevator into the black air

of an almost New Year

and need a minute to catch my breath

at the spread of city open to my eye.

I can't go to the edge; I never could.

The old fear of height still troubles me,

the sensation that nothing can be under me

if I am surrounded by mist and rain

and all of the dark night air we breathe.

Even a glimpse at the treetops in the park,

with its slick crisscrossing roads that plunge

into the jumbled panorama of East Side Manhattan,

hysterical tonight with its own incandescence,

gives me the willies. I feel as if

I were standing on the deck of a showboat of a cloud

as it drifts down some dark river, waiting for it

to bang into some other building's fifteenth floor.

How can these old people hunch the railing,

hoisting their plastic glasses of champagne

from under dripping umbrellas, as if

they drank the rain as they laugh

their analyses of the weather?

Maybe now, like me, they have nothing to lose.

I moved in three weeks ago; this is my first trip

to the roof. I don't want to die tonight,

the first fatality of 1990! There's too much of me

I left in pieces last year, oh, the whole last decade:

But I'm up here to distract myself, temporarily,

from what I don't want or can't have

in the way of love. . . . That must be

the Triborough Bridge, tied in its strings

of blue lights, and I can see in Central Park

the skating rink, like a scoured mirror below,

where some madman waves a red lantern; he

must be drunk. I have only sipped a speck of Drambuie,

which I didn't carry in my Coca-Cola glass

up to these festivities. This is the first New Year's

I've spent alone in twenty, twenty-two years.

I never could go to the edge; but I did.

Out there in the dark: my marriage, the woman

I loved badly, as she did me, or none too well;

the places we lived; the apartment I once half-owned;

the thousands of books I had to leave behind

(though I am to be granted library privileges)

and the black and white cat I really miss.

My wife's with her friends tonight somewhere in Brooklyn;

friends of mine out there, too, though I don't know

where. It's just like me to move in the middle

of a telephone company strike. Thus, no calls

from anyone—and I don't even have

a telephone yet, so who could call? Damp but trying

to smile, I eye the revelers. Two young men

and their enormous girlfriends have joined us,

really large women who carry balloons, all ready

to froth in merry champagne. We check

our watches to the screams from swarms

of apartment windows to the west

as the sky lights up with the first furious

bombardment of colored shells. I can see that

red lantern swinging toward the rockets—aha!

So it wasn't a drunk, but the fireworks engineer

preparing to blow the year's last sky

to smithereens for our delight!

I like to follow the tiny spurts of flame

from the launching pad in their heavenward trajectory

as much as I like the rockets' red glare,

the bombs bursting in air, which give proof

to the night that I am still here, hands

jammed in the pockets of my sodden raincoat,

face dripping with rain, hat soaked, wondering

if the skinny guy in the army jacket behind me

(who looks just like I did in the sixties)

is mumbling his way into a combat flashback

and ready to hurl me over the edge of the roof

and into kingdom come. I guess not yet. We've

survived the first blasts of spinning green,

corkscrews of spangled flame, buds of fireballs

spewed in arching gold sprays, the whistling fire-fish

that curl and howl as they flare, falling to ash.

Screaming its head off, the New York New Year enters.

I feel sad that beautiful things must die,

even shadows made of smoke and flame,

whatever I thought I had made out of my life—

music, poems, books, kisses, a little useless fame.

The army guy behind me grumbles at the haze

of rocket smoke that coils around the trees,

then tumbles up into the air toward Harlem.

That bump and thud and bump sound everywhere,

more clouds smacking each other head-on.

The flashes of the explosions are close enough

to touch if you wanted to burn your fingers

on the sky, and the glare rocks our shadows back

against the brick, as if chaos snapped

our pictures in the dark. I smile for my portrait,

curious at the New Year, smelling the acrid smoke

of the one we've just destroyed. Then I squeeze into

the tiny elevator car with the others, anonymous,

reconciled to be so, back to my little apartment

and the waiting glass of amber drink I'll raise,

only half in jest, to my new life.

The New York School of Poets