Greenwich Avenue almost unrecognizable
Different curbs & pavements
People talking on phones
Bagel tables gone, sidewalk café defunct
A few haunts still standing
Alleys of unseemly intent
Walking on 8th Street
Brownstones with rustic, rusty fire escapes
Ceramic tiles announce house numbers with style
Façades of inexhaustible detail
I could walk forever

In formal days of school, always a ready answer
Late spring nights searching
For the start of Bleecker Street
We picked apart forms
& spoke tirelessly one night of jazz
The world's content impossible to catalog
So many people no one remembers
How little I knew of actual feeling, monologue
Where nothing truly painful transpired

I moved for jobs to lost corners of the country
Flat cities, box towers, boxcars
Colorless planes of discontent
Rust belt streets empty after 5 o’clock
My dream was always to return
I waited in the airports
For snow to die down & wind to blow out
Runway clear for my escape

Today I look out on moistened sidewalks
Clean-up from a night of comedy & error
I find Bleecker
& everything in front of me, within
Beyond recognition
Streets crossed backwards
Against themselves
Looking down the opposite street
At an impossible crossing
& soon the day expires

My teachers are dead
The world
Conducts its commerce without me
Pavements, sidewalk slabs, changes

Another generation
Looking for the next best thing
To create the beauty
& the love

Rich Landers was born in the U.S. and grew up in Brazil in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Belém. His poems have appeared in Descant, Euphony, New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Tampa Review, and Roots and Flowers (Henry Holt, 2001) and Light on the Walls of Life (Jambu Press, 2021). He lives in New York City.