Streaming Nancy Poem by Jessica Greenbaum

When the subway doors opened skunk
wafted over the platform, and the confluence
—14th Street: where it all comes together!—
brought on dualities, the dual nature
of dualities, like quatrains made of two
rhyming couplets I would soon read
on the train, and how my friend Nancy
Ralph (even her name going in opposite
directions) talking to me in the rain—well
half in the rain, one of us seemed to be
in the rain at all times beneath the triangular
awning of Three Lives & Co.—how Nancy
looked like a motorcycle moll and sage
femme all at once, and that's pretty true
for the experience of talking to her which,
if I could graph our conversations would be
something like Dive! Dive! because
we're instantly deep, deep in conversation
and the currents of philosophy (Nancy)
are swirling in a current of subject matter
(that'll be me) and in this case we were talking
about the nature of love and after I said
it resembles being caught in a huge yearning machine
she said, "I'm glad to hear you say that
because I've never found it to be a good feeling—
it doesn't feel good" and I remembered
first knowing Nancy and being at a wedding
where she wore a suit approximating bright
green sod, because she came from Oklahoma
and read Women's Wear Daily for her first
whole year in Manhattan and that's why her
magenta bra strap taught so much, and how
the day I came home from the hospital,
a big strange mammal, she brought brand-new
Bella a roll of yellow, starry tulle as a gift
and how, months later we dressed the baby up
as a pirate, a red bandana knotted over the top
of her baldy head, and strolled her around
the neighborhood, and one good thing
about middle age is how many such experiences
you can have with one person who still
meets you in the rain at a book party
even with all she's accomplished in her own
life which I would have to list in a list
poem in Ripley's Believe it or Not
including the little-clay-devils-in-a-bottle
project, the poetry-vending-machine
and The New York Food Museum entire
and by the time she waves goodbye, back
to her ex-weaving factory apartment
on the Lower East Side, now Chinatown,
I'm primed to enjoy the after-party itself,
and hard not to since the smashed
poet said to me, who maybe she thought
was someone I might know, like Nancy, "You
should congratulate yourself on your very
existence on this earth!" to which I replied
with an astonished are-you-okay?-look,
and everyone had written their addresses
on one napkin that was going to be transcribed
to one person's computer and e-mailed,
but you know, it was raining pretty hard
and that was not a Sharpie we wrote with
and I was thinking about marriage, that duality,
how you create an island in the middle
of two streaming disappointments (here,
Jed may disagree, disappointed; I'd be
disappointed if he didn't) just sitting together
surveying the meandering, frothing
happinesses caused by your rock and stones
of friends and kids, and as I walked home
the wet leaves on the shiny night sidewalk
looked like pennies in a fountain and I thought
that was pretty funny since I felt so hugely
unlucky (regardless of the local, national
and international reasons I had no earthly right
to) until seeing Nancy, until waving goodbye