In a Day

in a day he drove through the city, the city was rich and crowded, the neighborhoods fell into each other like a puzzle, he drove like a demon over every road from dawn to dusk and through the night he drove every corner of every borough attempting to take every inch of the town, he knew the place well having driven its streets for so long, having been raised in the city that spanned over the water and was full brimming with people,

the people were of every kind gray-haired, blonde, brown, bald, beautiful, ugly languages and dialects surrounded him intonations welled in him as he thought of every place and every person he had seen in the city

he could not fathom every detail having a limited capacity to envision everything he somehow felt cheated as he raced around the city hour after hour with the pain that had driven him

but at some point after he had run through the Jewish, Italian, black and Hispanic neighborhoods, after he had crossed the great Verrazano three times and the munificent George Washington twice and past up Fifth Avenue through Central Park and into the depths of Harlem and had watched the doormen on Park Avenue and had driven through the tunnel to Maspeth and Cypress Hills till everyone had seen his car racing down potholed streets and the dirty highways

and he remembered, he had only wanted to visit the city so muscled and mysterious he surrendered, never venturing to drive its streets (all at once) again