Culture, Textualty, and Syntax

Early yesterday evening,
as I sat on a downtown train
reading a book titled Narrativity, Myth, and Revolution,

I noticed a young woman sitting across from me
who was reading an even thicker book
titled Warfare, Gender, and Historiography.

What a pair, as my father used to say
about most of my mother’s married friends
particularly a neighbor named Babs

who drank bourbon highballs and crossed her legs
on a couch in my parents’ living room
while her husband nursed a ginger ale.

What a pair, I muttered to myself as I rose
for the Astor Place stop
and spotted a man in a tan windbreaker

who had his head in a doorstop called
Identity, Anarchy, Illusion, and Disease.
We all deserve each other, I muttered,

as I stepped onto the platform,
eyeing the lights on the back of the train
that bore all the people and their tricky books

into the future — a sudden reminder
that I was running late for tonight’s lecture,
“Hyper-Time: the Death of the Future of the Future,”

the last in a series of talks that had begun
when the city was shimmering with heat,
I realized, pulling my scarf tight around my throat.