The Poet in New York by David Beckman

New York canyons imprint
the brain’s synapses
while energy fields on West 55th Street
fire the imaginative cortex.

At Riverside Park’s 83rd Street entrance
a haunting muse captures rhymed couplets
in a net of lavender while down the Hudson
come barges bearing horns of fruit and folly.

Dawn brings bleached skyscapes
and seagulls winging across Hell’s-Kitchen lowrises
while late revelers angle across intersections
baying mating mantras at the fading moon.

On East 79th Street a seeker, buoyed by Zabar’s coffee and
Marcus Aurelias’ Meditations stalks the New York Society Library for scraps of wisdom and runic rhyme
and finds his soul waiting in the sixth floor stacks.

Later, light cascades off of the Chrysler Building
so that his eyes engorge hope’s sheer shards and
on West 47th Street he joins an Aristotelian brigade
cornering awe and pity at the St. James Theater.


		David Beckman
		The Poet in New York A Lorca Corrective
		New York canyons imprint the brain’s synapses while energy fields on West 55th Street fire the imaginative cortex. At Riverside Park’s 83rd Street entrance a haunting muse captures rhymed couplets in a net of lavender while down the Hudson come barges bearing horns of fruit and folly. Dawn brings bleached skyscapes and seagulls winging across Hell’s-Kitchen lowrises while late revelers angle across intersections baying mating mantras at the fading moon. On East 79th Street a seeker, buoyed by Zabar’s coffee and Marcus Aurelias’ Meditations stalks the New York Society Library for scraps of wisdom and runic rhyme and finds his soul waiting in the sixth floor stacks. Later, light cascades off of the Chrysler Building so that his eyes engorge hope’s sheer shards and on West 47th Street he joins an Aristotelian brigade cornering awe and pity at the St. James Theater.
		David Beckman graduated from Brown University and holds a graduate degree in English from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. In New York he was a poetry mentor in a Manhattan charter school and taught fiction writing at the Chautauqua Summer Writers’ Conference. Since moving to Santa Rosa, California, he’s read his poems at a number of Bay area venues, including Maxine Hong Kingston’s 2006 peace event in Santa Rosa. A chapbook of his poems, Times Three, appeared in 2008. David’s plays have been performed in New York and California. His novel, Under Pegasus, was published by Derrynane Books in 1996, and is under option for a film. He has just finished his second, On Quaker Road, about the Underground Railroad of North Carolina.
		© David Beckman All Rights Reserved