This is the first poem from my second book, Success Stories. Like “Pale Fish,” it’s about life in a sort of cave, a period when my wife and I were trying to pull together funding for a movie so we wouldn’t have to really work for a living. In the East Village in the 1980s, that all made sense. We lived on a sense of entitlement. We were artists, and our life was a movie, at least to ourselves.
Waiting for Money
We sleep late through the morning and make
love quietly in the middle of the day.
We’re waiting for the telephone to ring.
Someone somewhere in California is reading
our script. They’ll let us know next week, they say.
My wife says it’s like waiting for your dream
boat to ask you to the prom.
We’re living mainly on credit cards these days.
Each week, I feel the easy trigger
tighten as I sign for cash. We’re optimistic.
In New York, the air is filled with impossible money.
For the first time in years, we have all day
to be with each other. We make a date
for the Museum of Natural History
on Wednesday nights when it’s almost empty.
We study the natural defenses of the sponge,
learn where the dinosaurs went wrong, carefully follow
the moody spells of recorded shamans.
When we get home, the answering machine
sits silent. We’ll watch the late show
like insomniacs, or talk a bit, and I’ll fall asleep
remembering the dark museum, the wolves
racing through the moonlit forest, racing
all night through the deep, blue snow.
