Poetry by Lewis Leicher
Why, when I close my eyes, do I still see a city?
Buildings piled high, bees flying from dumpster to dumpster,
yellow cabs blooming in the streets. Mid-July in Manhattan,
90° by 10:00 A.M.—the cracked sidewalks, trying to
perfect their tans, are getting sunburned. No air conditioning
at home, I go to an early movie, where it’s freezing.
___________________
In 1980, as I entered my mid-twenties,
I had a job typing on a Wang Word Processor
weekday evenings (5:00 to 10:00). Personal computers
were not widely available yet. For a young writer,
access to a true editing machine was life-changing.
I worked on the forty-fifth floor of a building on Broadway,
with a view of Clinton (aka Hell’s Kitchen), the piers,
the Hudson, and the New Jersey horizon. The sun setting
below the clouds and the pollution turned the twilight sky
into a portrait painted by Impressionist angels: posed
in a pewter and slate blue uniform, with four silver stars
and vivid ribbons of indigo, crimson, copper, and gold.
I’d bring café con leche from a Cuban-Chinese place
and work quietly, by myself. Usually, there was no one
else around for that shift, except the security guards.
It was so peaceful. Once, I saw a big dragonfly fly by
my window—or was that a drone from another world?
The weekends felt like they lasted much longer than
the allotted two or three days, and the seasons seemed
to change more frequently than quarterly. There were millions
of people to watch and I watched them, in their natural
habitats—eating and drinking, talking and walking
(or rollerblading)—and saw that some were watching me.
I’d fallen in love with the City—fascinated and charmed,
as so many are, by the variety, the history,
the pace, and that too-famous, it-never-sleeps,
bright-neon-dream-(and/or-nightmare) quality.
Like many twenty-somethings, I tried on personalities
and changed them pretty frequently. Some were so different
they tuned into different FM stations: a few loved rock,
punk, and new wave; two favored disco and its dance descendants;
one chose jazz and American standards; another classical.
I still like those, as well as folk, country, pop, blues, R&B
and reggae, and their over-hyphenated collaborations.
“Personalities” sounds too jargon-y—“personal styles”
is a more accurate, though stilted, description. I’d like
to think that each of those old personal styles remains a part
of me, but lots of things I did back then now make me cringe,
including most of the clothes I chose and the drugs I did.
Still, some of those lost “me”s were way more fearless than I can
ever hope to be again—those personalities I miss.
Lewis Leicher has returned to poetry, now that he has retired, after an almost forty-year break (for which poetry has not yet forgiven him). During that break, he worked as an attorney, including for almost twenty years for WebMD. He has lived in San Diego since 2001 and, before that, lived mostly in and around New York City.