The Spanish Lesson

               for Jay Wright

It is late, and I hurry
up to Seventeenth Street
from the PATH station
facing a roasted nut stand.
Police on the corners
smile in pressed uniforms,
patrolling wooden barricades
while Sixth Avenue
lies open like a black ribbon
to the dense skyscrapers
in midtown that crowd
the sky wincing above.
I realize slowly
that a parade is coming with
the proud, red antique
engines of the fire companies
from an America
of more secure boundaries,
of defensible difference,
of ethnic occupations.