fucking and sucking cock all night: they were weary and at
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peace: and there seemed to be a truce just then, for the duration
of the dawn, between night and day, between people and despair. The boy and girl, radiant and tender with pleasure, hung out of the window. Underneath them men dragged themselves
toward home, tender with fatigue. I sat by the open window
and smiled. It was the only time to be awake and alive on that
Lower East Side street corner. The light would be not quite
daylight: night was still mixed in with it: and there was peace.
Then the sun would be up, glaring and rude. The night would
be defeated and angry, preparing to return with a vengeance.
The vagabonds would shit and move. The fumes would begin
anew for the day, inevitably thicker and more repellent than
before, more repulsive than it was possible to be or to imagine
or to engineer or to invent. The whores would go home short
and lose more teeth. The boys across the way would shoot up,
sleep, eventually ride their bikes or go stand on street corners.
I would go to the small distant room and try to sleep on the
Salvation Army mattress under the open window. I would hear
the sirens. I would wake up burning, with ice not fire.
*
I would sit by the open windows in the living room and watch
the dark, then the light: dawn was my pleasure, a process
pungent with melodrama, one thickness edging out another,
invading it, permeating it: dark being edged out, a light
weighing the night down until it was buried in the cement.
You could slice the night and you could slice the day, and it
was just the hour or two, some parts of the year it seemed like
only minutes, in which both mixed together resembling peace.
The light would begin subtly and I could just see some tree-
tops up the street in the park. At first they looked like a line, a
single line, an edge of jagged mountaintops etched against a
dark eternity with a sharp, slight pencil, and gradually the line
filled in, got deeper and deeper until the shape of each tree got
filled in, and then color came, the brown branch, bare, the
leaf-covered branch, green, the blossom-covered branch,
chartreuse. I could see some dogs being walked early, the first
ones of the day coming, forms under artificial light turning
into creatures of flesh and blood when the real light came. I
could see, in the next room, the tousled head of my love, the
boy I live with, sleeping. Soon he would wake up and I would
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go to sleep and he would go to work and I would have stopped
working: now while he still slept and I was a vigilant consciousness I opened the windows that had been closed in the living room and sat down next to them to watch the dawn, the
kindest time.
In the hour before my turn came, my turn to sleep, night
