Kissing the Past’s Ass
This lyric pinched from an old Loudon Wainwright song, pretty much
sums up what I’m up to these days.
At my age, looking back is far more beguiling than looking ahead.
It’s easier to romance the past, after all, than a future with the
finish line too clearly in view.
So dear reader, I can only hope that you too are drawn to nostalgia.
Here’s a poem that’s drenched in it:
Forty Views of 800 Third
It would be utter madness
to suggest that my
forty views of 800 Third
bear a flake of comparison
to Hokusai’s iconic views
of Mt Fuji— save to note
we were both in our
late sixties as I hurried up
Third Avenue among
the sunlit bop of
office workers at noon
to capture the gleaming
fifty-story structure where
nearly forty years earlier
I had gained a sliver of
fame, fortune and a whole
lot of you know what.
As I lay on my stomach
trying for some low-angle
Orson Welles kind of thing,
a young passerby in holey
jeans, mistaking me for a
tourist which in fact I was,
having vanished from NYC
long ago, said “Hey mister,
that building’s not famous
or anything. You want a
real souvenir, the Chrysler
Building’s only one block west.”
But of course I didn’t want
the Chrysler Building, MoMA
or Central Park in the rain.
I wanted 800 Third, and I
wanted it so bad I covered
it midday to dusk, in shadow
reflection and glare, kissing
its Tuscan marble with my
telephoto along the way.
I wanted it so bad I could see myself
striding out its smoked-glass doors,
portfolio in hand to sell
a Pepsi ad that landed
a Gold Lion at Cannes
the following summer
where I lounged poolside
at the Hotel du Cap,
a regular Scott Fitzgerald
recovering from a martini-
jazzed all-night bender.
But my wife was waiting
and I was running out of
light, so in time I did what
my holey friend suggested:
I shuffled off to Lexington
and captured a black & white
photo of the Chrysler Building
so deco delicious, it graces
the study wall of our home
in the great American West,
all forty views of 800 Third
tucked safely away in a folder
marked “Mt Fuji.”