New York City: A Love Letter

Dear one

imagining the move to New York City,

magnetized and terrified

because it outstretches your resources,

challenges your certainties,

it’s somewhere you’ll have to grow into —

do it.

The world packed in to an 8-mile island,

nowhere to expand but up,

ambition its lifeblood: its monuments

will keep rising, redefining

your sense of enough.

You will get hungrier, bolder,

beat up, schooled by a gauntlet

of competition, smarts, risk,

You will fall in love over and over

with strangers becoming less strange

by the ways we can’t help but human each other.

A good decade in,

I wish you a long bike ride down Broadway

on a winter night as the lights

of cafes set up in the street flicker on,

each a resilient little world —

past the street corner of that electric first kiss,

its own infinitely buildable Manhattan schist

The campus that taught you to question the rules,

and became too small a university

for the universe of your becoming

That speakeasy where you danced in a new way,

With what the heat of a hundred bodies and a bassline said

The old church where the new poets read

The diner a decked out grand dame walked in, redefined

aging as theatre with a thousand acts

The subway station where a lone violinist played you through

a heartbreak at 3am

That studio on 23rd St. where a vision began

The tiny apartment that spilled dinner parties into the hall

the avenue you marched in protest, becoming neighbors with each step —

This city, The City.

Glitter and steam and stink and sirens and unending swirl —

it will always feel open-ended, unresolved, seductive

as possibility.

I wish you an impossible adios

heart throbbing in your throat

with not enough ways to say

thank you thank you thank you

except what you might create

on the bedrock it forged.