Three poems by The New York Times editor Harvey Shapiro

• Nights
• Drunk and weeping. It’s another night
• at the live-in opera, and I figure
• it’s going to turn out badly for me.
• The dead next door accept their salutations,
• their salted notes, the drawn-out wailing.
• It’s we the living who must run for cover,
• meaning me. Mortality’s the ABC of it,
• and after that comes lechery and lying.
• And, oh, how to piece together a life
• from this scandal and confusion, as if
• the gods were inhabiting us or cohabiting
• with us, just for the music’s sake.

• New York Notes
• 1.
• Caught on a side street 
• in heavy traffic, I said 
• to the cabbie, I should 
• have walked. He replied, 
• I should have been a doctor. 

• 2. 
• When can I get on the 11:33 
• I ask the guy in the information booth 
• at the Atlantic Avenue Station. 
• When they open the doors, he says. 
• I am home among my people.

• Oppen
• The muffled sea, until you’re at the margin. 
• Fog up and down the beach. Space obliterated,
• the way it must have been for George—
• by Alzheimer’s—when we walked from
• Polk Street where he lived the few blocks
• to the San Francisco waterfront, and he
• didn’t know whether he was in China
• or at sea. At sea, I guess, is what it comes down to,
• though for most of his life, at sea
• meant at home to him. He crafted
• the boats in which he rode out the storms.
• Needle’s eye was close to where he lived.
• Then to end that way—compass lost—
• who knew the materials, built the rough deck.

Harvey Shapiro (1924-2013) was an American poet and editor who wrote twelve books of poems in the course of his career. His style is characterized by a subtle humor and an epigrammatic approach to expressing the experiences of everyday life. He was also an editor at The New York Times from 1957 to 2005, mainly associated with the paper’s magazine and book reviews.