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Sunday Avenue


ISSUE:  Spring 1981

It’s Sunday again, but there will be
no calls home, no walks east in Manhattan
to the docks, or to the bakeries south
of Houston Street. Only muted sun
off the Avenue and wilted endive
for a snack and Riesling
from Oregon. Geographical,
restrained, locked here
behind the finest cylinders abstract
fear can buy: Yale and Medeco. Sunday
afternoon behind a book with Sunday
photographs of New Orleans and Europe,
or old travel diaries: Morocco
and Cairo, a 1972
New York, New York. What is it
the black cat dreams of over on the sofa?
She is waiting for the spring and the spring
flies, waiting for the roof weeds
to rise up so she can again graze Sundays
when there is the terrace to sweep and pace.
In Pittsburgh my mother marinates fish
Sundays. In Los Angeles my sisters
cover their redwood fences with redwood
stain—old blood like the light of afternoon
air here, nothing to do but hold onto
what doesn’t want to leave anyway. I
am thinking of you who left on Sunday,
another Sunday, dry like this one, and
although its Sunday again, no calls home.

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