Loren Mciver

she greeted me at the door

of her Greenwich village

town house 

a fugitive

from another age of New York

the door shut behind us

and into a world long 

left behind

This place was the

last gasp

of Bohemia

the walls with their

crumbling pallor in shades

of death

took the undulating

shapes of her 

crippled shoulders

Up those impossible stairs

 the studio cluttered with

another generation's

worries and joys 

unfolded

before me like a crime scene

there lay remnants

of a night with Calder

twisted into shapes of

champagne cork

housings

were dancers doing pirouettes.

in another corner were exuberances

scribbled on walls by 

Marianne Moore

and ee Cummings

echoes 

of stars gone dark

If I believed in ghosts

then I saw the

hunched shape

of Dylan Thomas

at the kitchen table

crying for

sobriety

A skylight above

crowned the space 

but like on a stage

the light that filtered

through

came from an imaginary

place

We spent our evenings

in the twilight

of her memories

excavating meaning

from an unchanged

narrative

she was its reluctant survivor

left alone

abandoned even

 with her pots of paint

and sticks of chalk

only her gnarled fingers 

at the end 

could scratch out

a clear message

from a

time gone by

a time

she liked better

than 

now