New York Poet

by David Hosgood

You tell me you
need only to
see
other people—not
know them, only
see them—and I assume
what you mean by this

is you need
to be
near them
as they pass—to exist
alone

with poetry
and passion
in the city
that loves you (as surely
it must),

to know its
strides—purposeful, elegant,
stumbling—its brief and
lingering
glances, its dizzying
dances
of color and voice, its wide,
obtuse and
ordinary smiles, its easy
talk and urgent business
of business

and seduction, its lazy
afternoons with beer
and hip-hop and
slow touch, and endless
autumns of
great achievement—you need,
I think,

to feel
warm exhalations
of city air, to know, even,
the death of city—this part
and that—
slow decay of
old hands
and exhausted minds,

and the startling
laughter of the new
and barely verbal,
myriad
smells and hurried
notations, city
chatter and city
hum, the soul
of its
eyes, the taste
of its tongue: I believe

this, dear
woman—
you
are poetry

in a city
that steals
and cajoles
and negotiates
poetry
from you
and gives it back
with a strange
but human

caress.

David Hosgood’s poetry has been published throughout his native Australia, where he lives with his long-time partner, two loud Siamese cats named Barrister and Caine, and a young kangaroo, still-unnamed, who’s recovering from a virulent intestinal parasite. Mr. Hosgood’s first book of poetry, Staying in the Trenches for Fun and Profit, will be published by Laramie Press later this year.