IF IT WILL EVER BE LIGHT AGAIN

264. ...IF IT WILL EVER BE LIGHT AGAIN (nyc, november, 1967):

But let’s listen no matter for the water is washing the walls and the sea is coming up from its limitless depths and flooding the walkways and the saltwater seeds what it can as fish die flopping around and the little pace of seaside snails and crab-legs too are seen slithering slowly to their own small demise - the windows stay wet and everything is damp and there really is no weather any longer - for the sky has become the air and all atmosphere as only rainclouds perform at street-level now and fog is the name for the daylight : we wish it were not so BUT yet it seems as if this civilization is over and ‘we have tanked the attempt we have surely ruined the effort but whether or not we get another chance is the question on everyone’s lips’ and at night when the world goes dark it is such now that no one is ever sure any more if it will ever be light again (and for that a certain uncertainty is certain).
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Nonetheless those who linger will stay behind - watching the seawall falter watching the great ships at anchor and seeing the riotous waves as they surmount the bulwarks and the walls the bulkheads and the landings and everything will seep and totter and twist and fall : there will come (most certainly) a time when the momentary lapse of whatever resembles calm will overtake us all and the waverings and movements of the world around us shall seem as nothing else but this - a wild ponderous degradation a failing of the essences a destruction of elemental notion and a complete fragmentation of the unitary world as we have ever known it.
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And then I went far downtown - to where the Lebanese guys along the West Street piers drank their lime colas and heavy brews from chairs they'd set up on the roofs and they'd sit there and watch the evening fade to darkness and they'd curse the west and curse the darkness AND the light together and then the one who knew would get up and go inside and he'd come back out with two rifles and they'd point straight out to the west and looking across the Hudson in the dwindling light they'd simply fire their guns until there was no sound left and the darkness came and they'd invite me in and we'd sit some more - this time with their sickly sweet tea - and I'd listen for hours to their weird crazy tales about other lands and other places and what I knew of the differences between counted for little - Beirut to Ankara and Turkey to Lebanon - none of it meant anything to me just a breath of fresh air in the late 1967 air.