Lewis Warsh
Lewis Warsh (1944–2020) was a poet, fiction writer, editor, publisher, and teacher. He authored over 35 books of poetry, fiction, and autobiography, and his book of poems Elixir, completed in 2020, & from which these poems are selected, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.
Lewis Warsh (1944–2020) was a poet, fiction writer, editor, publisher, and teacher. He authored over 35 books of poetry, fiction, and autobiography, and his book of poems Elixir, completed in 2020, & from which these poems are selected, is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.
She had the feeling someone was watching them from a distance, from the roof of one of the buildings bordering the ocean, but no one was there. She turned her head, she looked behind her, she stared at the ocean where there was a single boat on the horizon. No one.
It started when I met Robert on the subway. Our life took place mostly indoors, occasionally in restaurants, especially in the beginning.
I don’t have to be anywhere, but I wake up early, 6:35. Some mornings I set the alarm for seven but wake up at five and play over all the things I’ve ever done wrong, every conversation where I might have said something (inadvertently or on purpose) to hurt another person’s feelings.
A few minutes out of Penn Station, I took a book out of my shoulder-bag, a dog-eared paperback copy of The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, which I’d first read as an undergraduate. Someone told me Lessing was dying, and I remembered all the days and nights of my first year in New York, lying in bed with a gin and tonic and a cigarette in the small suite of dorm rooms I shared with two other students, a long scarf wrapped like a cobra around my neck, shoulders and arms.
Dear Robert, I’m sorry to be communicating with you in this way instead of talking to you in person or even on the phone, but I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, our relationship, which has lasted for more than a year. As you know. Sometimes it feels much longer—whole decades—and sometimes the shortest of intervals have passed since that fateful day we met on the B train.
Now he says he’s almost finished with his book about Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, but I don’t know whether to believe him. He seems to be drinking more, a combination of wine, beer and bourbon passing out on the couch before we even get into bed.
There was the moment just before we were about to leave the cafe, when it felt like we’d been together for hours, though no more than forty-five minutes had elapsed since the time we walked up the steps of the subway on West Fourth Street, and then around the corner to the Caffe Reggio on Macdougal.
So we meet on the subway and go for coffee in a place on Macdougal Street, right around the corner from the West 4th Street subway stop on 6th Avenue. Caffe Reggio, it’s been there forever, from the time Macdougal was the center of the universe, when Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Mimi and Richard Farina and Phil Ochs used to perform free in all the nightclubs and coffeehouses, like The Gaslight, The Fat Black Pussycat and the Cafe Wha.
“The one thing to remember about Melville is that he wrote Moby Dick when he was thirty years old. Thirty.” I hold up a battered paperback copy. The same copy I read in high school.