Lines for Salinger at Ninety - Lamont Palmer

Tables are often "lousy with glasses",
a messy significance on Broadway.
Will we see the world as it is or as
it was, when it was only a globe in class?
Often lives soar wildly like the Lunts
over the East River. This is theatre,
the cynical lessons taught and told,
the old man, Jerome, and the young neck-tied boy
of wisdom, in one pimply universe.
We wonder about the absent ducks
(perhaps our own imminent absence)
and the "secret slobs", untested for the better.
The pianos are playing and the big men
are playing them. The noise is closing in,
trains are barreling to nowhere quickly,
holidays no longer support the tinsel
they cling to. It smacks of grim martinis,
the misanthropy of the dazed dim bubbles
springing up in the glass of a long life.
I need rest, like the boy: time away
from situations, contrivances and
f-words (cold implications) in rude stairwells.


Lamont PALMER
Used by permission of Lamont Palmer.