David Lehman
The sky is crumbling into millions of paper dots
the wind blows in my face
so I duck into my favorite barbershop
and listen to Vivaldi and look in the mirror
reflecting the shopfront windows, Broadway
and 104th, and watch the dots blown by the wind
blow into the faces of the walkers outside
& here comes a thin old man swaddled in scarves,
he must be seventy-five, walking slowly,
and in his mind there is a young man dancing,
maybe seventeen years old, on a June evening--
he is that young man, I can tell, watching him walk
Oh I love this poem. I love the description of this little moment - the sky crumbling into snowflake "dots," the Vivaldi and the barbershop and of course this old man, wrapped up against the elements out on the sidewalk and so very clearly somewhere else. Or maybe the narrator just wants to believe that this man thinks of himself as being somewhere else, being a version of himself that he once was. Or maybe the narrator sees himself in this man...recalling a memory of being seventeen, dancing in the summer night while the dots swirl around outside.
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