Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(12)
My work used to be like art for me: giving form to the world. I sometimes have a vague intimation that people were better read and smarter once upon a time. I could write a divisional ad for luggage with perfect anaphora and no one would doubt its effectiveness:
If you are a man who is apt to decide at eleven o’clock to catch the midnight boat …
If you are a woman with a penchant for weekends …
If you are a student about to embark by Student Third Class …
*
It likely would have ended with something along the lines of: “One of Macy’s wardrobe trunks will add to your comfort.”
Now I don’t work anymore, and the world is uncomfortable.
5
Lunch Poems
People didn’t always hate pigeons in the city—in fact, one could look up and catch glimpses of homing-pigeon lofts atop a lot of the lower buildings, owners doting on the dear little things, circling on their wings high above the rooftops. But people have come to make a hobby of detesting the birds, I think, because they’ve come to see that pigeons are much like people: dirty and murmuring, greedy and abundant, flocking in a corpus of such shit and weight that one fears they may permanently deface or crush whatever they congregate on.
But ever since we learned about augury in our advanced Latin class at Goucher College, I’ve had a fondness for them. The omen I always augur from the rippling gray waves of their massed flight is straightforward: If I am in a place with that many pigeons, then it is probably urban enough for me to want to live there and be satisfied with the quantity of urbanity.
Manhattan has always been such a place, never more so than that day in early November 1931, when I was out walking among both the pigeons and the people. I was on my lunch break, on my way to my publisher’s office to drop off a corrected set of final proofs for my debut book, Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises. My first poetry collection was coming out. It even had a birthday: April 5, 1932. A springy book with a springtime release, it had to go to press in time to send out advance copies for review.
I could have sent the proofs by messenger, but I wanted to walk south from my office at R.H. Macy’s to E.P. Dutton at 300 Fourth Avenue, and though Broadway was the straightest route, I wanted to take Sixth Avenue. It would be just twenty minutes by foot.
I always took walks on my lunch breaks. That, in fact, was when I’d written most of the book. For me, a peaceful atmosphere devoid of noise and distractions is absolutely the worst place for poetry, likely to wind me up in a doomed attempt to stare down a blank page. My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight. Taking to the pavement always helps me find new routes around whatever problem I’m trying to solve: phrases on signs, overheard conversations, the interplay between the rhythms of my verse and the rhythm of my feet.
I was hardly the only poet in the city who worked like this, of course. Manhattan was full of lunchtime poets in those days, and stayed that way for many years thereafter. In the sixties, long after I had been forgotten, a clever young man even published a well-regarded book by that title—Lunch Poems—and although I wanted to resent him for jumping my claim, I could not; his lines were too full of the real sounds of people’s voices and the vitality of the street. Even that seems long ago now. I wonder where today’s lunch poets are, and whether I would know them by sight.
On that November day, however, I strolled in youthful, cheerful ignorance of the tradition in which I had been participating. This particular walk was like an early Christmas present to myself: the street beneath the IRT Sixth Avenue Line. The Sixth Avenue Elevated. Chow mein restaurants and diners with names like The Griddle. Cinders and ash and noise sifting down, shaking the ground, rattling the buildings. Above me, the commuters getting disgorged at one of the overhead stops dislodged a deposit of pigeons like a plume of smoke. I would not want to live there, but the walk was magnificent.
Do not think that I romanticized every moment of my life in the city. I cherished my work, but I worked so hard. Each day there’d come a moment when I’d be tired to death. Practically out of breath from exhaustion. A dull pencil, a dull mind, in need of a sharpener, in need of a drink, or at least an unthinking wandering down the hall among the other copywriters on the thirteenth floor. Outside crocuses flaunting their carefree colors, me inside and sunk with care.
The walks—morning, lunch, and home at night—revived me.
I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming. Oh, that I could be a local swan in the park. Or the sparrow loafing on the window ledge.
But I never quite grew tired of being reliable. Even once I had money to burn—and it didn’t take me long to have it—I still had to work. I wanted there to be something to do in life besides mate and reproduce and die, and advertising was that, or it was for a long while.
When I wasn’t walking, I had a window and a rubber plant in the sun on a radiator. If I craned my neck, I could see a brief but valiant silver sliver of the Hudson River. I could make myself find window washers as serene as buttercups.
Irksome pedestrian behavior, I knew, but if I turned and looked behind me, I could see the Empire State Building, just completed. So I turned and looked behind me.
They’d cut the ribbon a few months back, in May. It had practically been a national holiday.