A few days

I came yesterday
on the Empire State Express,
eight hours of boredom.

Once again,
it’s another day, a gray day,
damp as a dog’s mouth,
this unlikely August.

If anybody called me
by my camp name
nowadays
I’d sock them—

A few days:
how to celebrate?

It’s no day
for writing poems.
Or for writing,
period.

There aren’t any novels
about blindstiffs
these days:
Tramping on Life.

I’d like to spend part
of this lovely day
in a darkened
theater:
only there’s nothing
I want to see.

You suddenly look
like an old
woman,
the old woman
you may one day
become.

She sits all day,
a monument to patience,
almost eighty-nine
if she’s a day.

Like the picture
in my grandmother’s Bible
of Judgment Day:
Rembrandtesque beams
of spotlights
through cloud cities
on a desolate landscape.

Sunday, “the worst day,”
and we all sit
snowbound
in drifts
of Sunday paper.

Monotonous days,
daydreaming
of any place but here.

The radio is on:
perhaps this will be
a lucky day.

Today,
the color of a buttercup,
winds on the spool of time,
an opaque snapshot.

It’s cool for August
and I can’t
nail the days down.

Tomorrow is another day,
no better than today,
if you only realize.

Today
is better than yesterday,
but I still feel cold.

I mailed letters
today:
Denver Art Museum,
Chemical Bank
(that should bring
in money),
Savitsky, my lawyer:
he pays my bills.

Good day,
Signor Oscari:
are you still a grocer
by trade?

Thirty-five dollars
for a dozen roses,
Sterling Silver:
not today.

On the last day of August
I feel much better
than I felt
in June,
heaven be praised.

But Queens
seems awfully far
to give the day
a gentle lift.

It’s Wednesday morning,
but later than
I got up yesterday:
the sun is off
the balcony.

People say,
“Ooooh,
you have a balcony,”
as though I stand there
every day
surveying Twenty-Third Street:
Chelsea Sewing Center,
Carla Hair Salon.

Today is tomorrow:
the dead time.

What will it be like
when there’s no more
tomorrow?

It must
have been horrible
to live
before the days
of modern medicine—
all those greats
going off their chump from syphilis
or coughing their lungs out
with TB.

A few days,
spend them riotously.

I wish
I could go on a diet
for a few days:
to reduce the outer man
to weigh
what he should.

For today’s repast
remembered.

One day
the telephone:
it’s Hilde.

Here it is
Labor Day Weekend
and all my friends
are out of town:
just me
and some millions
to whom I have not yet
been introduced.

Now
tomorrow is today,
the day before
Labor Day, 1979.

________________

Note: “A few days” is a poem from my housebound, pandemically composed complete English-to-English translations of the Collected Poems of James Schuyler (1993). For my poem, I’ve excised, sometimes transformed, and collaged every instance in Schuyler’s poem “A few days” (originally more than 25 pages long) where he uses the words “day,” “yesterday,” “today,” or “tomorrow.”