You came to me with a handful of coins
Still wet from the well
And asked to buy
The only part of me I couldn’t sell.
I was delighted to receive the above poem when I did. It came at the close of two long poetic days that were defined by my resignation from the greatest job available in New York City – resident raconteur in a beaux-arts mansion across from the MET where I had a near unlimited stock of drink at my disposal. The society was hosting a fundraiser at a country club, attendance at which required you to pay between five and ten thousand dollars, and I was enjoying a tipple of vodka until the managerial charlatan who had earlier sunk screwdrivers by my side turned and announced that I had had enough. An embarrassment, she said. She articulated my dancing as a shameful march, my monologue as an unintelligible warble. Outraged, I flanked the judge and jury with a surprise, unforeseen response to their rebuke: rather than plead my case to deaf ears, I turned and rolled down the many hills of the country club, found a sympathetic car and hitchhiked to the bank of the Hudson river. However, after skipping a few stones, with the strange distractedness that intense drunkenness procures, the realisation that I had left behind my gorgeous leather bag, and the essentials therein, jolted my silent, unthinking mind into determined movement.
In the window of a nearby house I found a youth getting a piano lesson and I asked him whether his father would give me a lift; the dad declined but pointed me in the right direction. Eventually, I got back and demanded my bag be brought to me. I was escorted by a hearty friend who understood the injustice done to me to her flat in the Bronx. There, I called my lawyer Aaron Martin and inquired as to whether I could sue the society, then I called NASA (which happened to be the first phone call she received after landing, exhausted, in JFK) and told her how my heart was a thousand-fold gouged, and then finally I fell asleep on the only bed in existence.
But I had written no poetry. I had lived deplorably and had no justification, nothing to point at and say, But Look! And without producing a long lasting note, my drunkenness just shatters my employability. But if it secretes one beautiful line like A bell/ hours from the Angelus/ barely resonant with/ an earlier knell/ its brief, raucous/ hallelujah, then its validity becomes at least arguable, somehow appreciable. Scorn not his drunkenness, he’s an artist.
And so, when I awoke in the Bronx and remembered my opprobrium, with my lungs rattling and whistling dryly with each inhalation, I became anxious for the absence of art. But soon a poem came, after a little more poetic life.
I got up from the bed and told the two angels who had housed me that we were to go for breakfast. I also instructed them that, because I had an inordinate amount of money, that they were to order whatever they wanted and as much of it as they pleased. Taking my own advice, I ordered a cup of oatmeal which I smothered with cinnamon and maple syrup, a steak and two eggs, hashbrowns, toast, coffee, and orange juice. With a full stomach, then, I announced to the angels that we are all phagomaniacs when hungover.
Put back on my feet by this great meal, I began walking and eventually found Fordham University, and, therein, a castle shaped like the one I knew intimately in Ireland. Led by my upward pumping fist, I jumped innocently for joy: I had smashed the relations which had allowed me to frequent a mansion in New York across from the MET, and only hours afterward I had found an upgrade: a turreted enormity of Irish origin, offering itself to me as a place to rest, to sit awhile. I found an empty classroom, balled up my blazer for a pillow, and let a meditative hour pass over me as I all the while said, with a deep and easy inhalation, This’ll do, and with a deep and easy exhalation, This’ll do.
Fully rested, tumescent, and desiring to see my adored lover, I decided it was time to take the train downtown. I suspected she was slightly annoyed with me as my ex-colleagues had called her late in the night asking for my whereabouts – of which she was ignorant. And so when I arrived at her door, wearing the suit she had seen me in two days prior, I made sure a bouquet of flowers was sat between the handles of my gorgeous leather bag. Immediately, I asked her if I could shower as I was genuinely filthy. As I stripped I apologised haphazardly. But, thankfully, she had no anger in her heart, and permitted me to rain kisses upon her when I emerged wet and wrapped in a towel. The best possible thing that could happen, happened.
Lying in her bed, each of us wrapped in post-coital lightmindedness, I asked her for a line, an image, a smidgen of art. A morsel, a bean of creation. But she pondered and pondered and could only meet my eyes apologetic and empty handed. She couldn’t do it, she said. And then, catching us both off-guard, the most wonderful quip sprung from her: I was holding her foot and she said they were her major insecurity, They’re the only part of me you couldn’t sell, she says, just like that. Whatever artistic faucet that dribbled meagrely when she asked it to flow, flowed triumphantly the moment she turned her back. I sat in the inertia of the line and knew by the tenor of the moment it was good, fertile stuff. An image of a boy with hands filled with wet coins, beseeching a woman standing on a street corner for her love, came to mind.
And so with her line and my image, the poem came. After two long days of gaudy, virtuous, deplorable life, the poem came. And it would have taken two centuries had I lived like a scholar or responsibly or in moderation.
Written in the basement of Jean’s, 7/23/25.
