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Rachel Hadas reads
 Empty Studio, National Arts Club
in Real Audio format.
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I sit and look out the window
North over Gramercy Park,
Licking the salt of Indian summer
Off my upper lip.
Yellows are passing in the street:
A manila folder; a blouse;
A slicker. What did we do to deserve
Brilliance such as this,
Caught between a hot summer
And fall’s aridity,
A dry and thirsty season
For the city and for me?
Anyway, thank you, yellow!
I toast you with a glass
Of warm white wine abandoned
On the carved mantelpiece
Of this magnificent studio.
For hours —
more likely days —
No one has ventured into this room
To look out over the trees
That canopy Gramercy Park.
From high summer’s rich green
The leaves have begun to thicken
And dry like cheese or wine.
Since Samuel Tilden built this house
(a century more),
someone has slapped a tobacco-brown
rug on the inlaid floor.
One of the windows has been plugged up.
An air conditioner wheezes
And rattles to discourage
October’s sultry breezes.
Spindly-legged plastic chairs
Are piled in a crooked heap,
Resembling oversized locusts
Waiting to take a leap.
Missing one of all of this,
Ironic, reticent,
A wall-sized mirror renders back
The room at a dusky slant,
Allowing my abstraction
To drift on its vast glaze.
And chewy husks of protein —
Bodies of drowned fruit flies —
Float in my glass. Yet since it savors
Of this still afternoon,
Right up as far as my closed lips
I tilt the acrid wine.

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