Old Man Directing Traffic in a Dream that Never Ends, Albany. N.Y.
alan catlin
His is the mind in rapid transit
between stops, waving emergency vehicles
the wrong way up Ontario Street, red
lights and sirens head on up aganist two
lanes of traffic and a large brick wall
no one else can see, the fall of Albany
in his eyes, the Alfred E. Smith building
in flames, Channel 10 News teams setting
up cameras, speaking as he speaks in a
gutteral form of grunt, faking the syllables,
the natural disasters that happen in the head
of this man turning sixty in a hurry, waving
down his dreams, dressed in ragged clothes
three sizes too small on the corner of a
block where two lane traffic turns to one
and goes the other way.
