You go to the skyline on the Private Stock record label: a piece of cloud above the World Trade. You fall in the clip of “Night Fever” the faces of the Gibbs superimposed against a Shell Oil sign. Some stuffy old man may tell you that the visions of Lorca were marred by his own closetness. That your poetry lacks heart. That your visions are inaccurate, illegitimate. He will say, “You are television incarnate. Indifferent to suffering. Insensitive to joy. All of life reduced to the common rubble of banality.” Don’t listen to him. Tell him to go to hell. Diane Keaton tells Elle, “In ’77, Annie Hall got all the accolades. That really did cement me as somebody.” You are somebody too, hey you, out there. With another line at dusk, the feeling of, With this day, did I do enough? Can be ameliorated. After the shoot, by the trash chute, Woody Allen eyes the back of People, Diane in a L’Oreal ad: skin in eerie pearlish glow.
Your night settles in. You walk the streets, past the empty condominiums. Mannequins on the balconies looking out at the dark windows of another empty condominium. Laura Mars disrobes out of her Halston. She shuts off her television. She shuts off the lights. Faye Dunaway, Why did you have to go away? Your crucifix is put away. You can no longer fit in your black bellbottoms. You are a bloated scientologist with a hair transplant. Stay here where you once were in your prime, head against the grafittied subway window, above the city in fear of the Son of Sam, on the edge of a blackout. We can take forever a minute at a time. Your rollerskates under the bed of a fling. In the middle of the night, Billy Collins at a dark window, singing “More Than A Woman,” writing a poem of the song stuck in his head: “a mad fanbelt of a tune” “cloying,” “vapid.” You are Brooke Shields. Calvin’s. A naked back out on Times Square. You’re going nowhere. With no one to love you. No arm across your back, I think of what you might say in this near-morning. I want you to remember.