Don Draper is Falling

I am too afraid for myself now, climbing subway

stairs and getting lost in people’s hair, the sleek of their grinning

parts.

A swift epoch of summer got placed between my ears

and slanted frames, and I’ll wait for time

to leave Manhattan in a mist, with all its doormen and smoky

twenty year olds leaning in sailing shirts, flirting

downwind.

All down 14^th street there are shopping bags tagged with hands, brushing

up against shallow ties and clouted men.

It’s their multitude!

and my gasping,

when I see them carrying around their humanness in square chest pockets;

with it dropping out whenever they bend down

for a New York Times.

I keep clicking my lighter at men in lonely hats,

while waiting for the 6 up to 68^th st,

and trying not to worry about the doors cutting us up with glass;

how they make me watch people grow small

through branches of shirt-sleeves

and long cylinders for eyes.

I’ve spent so much time trying to be mysterious

to someone in Grand Central; dressing in worn

leather suitcases, only to find myself

undone at another

woman’s finer seams.

Nor is there anyone sipping on the other side of my Marlboro.

I had thought we could share stories and our fragments

and kiss at the end,

outside the brick buildings of afternoon.

All this,

how it catches on the edges of me;

         to return in rain and find the hall paintings

brownly dreaming.

But every night in the TV room,

Don Draper is falling

faceless along

razored legs, falling

the length

of skyscrapers, through

plaid families

and bourbon drinks;

into a glossy void

of Rosetta ads

for picture babies,

for starlets in winking 

green.

And yet

every time,

with Lucky Strike

in hand, his back

to me in pleats, he always ends up

          sitting in a chair.