Write-Down

WRITE-DOWN

Selling begets more selling.
–Sean Egan of the independent bond-rating firm Egan-Jones
quoted in The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2008

Today’s tropes
are maelstrom
and marriage.

The Street is “roiled,”
“in turmoil.”

Remember happy days
when Treasury and Fed
forced the “shotgun marriage”
of Bear Stearns
to JP Morgan Chase?

Now the “downward spiral”
palpably portends
a “jittery road for markets.”

Lehman’s disgrace
congealed Sunday morning
as its “last potential suitor”
“pulled out.”

While “once-proud financial institutions”
sink “to their knees,”
“humbled” by the
“tectonic shift,”

a thundering herd of ailing
and/or dead metaphors
galumphs through my crawlspace–
swine intent
on barging off a cliff.

II.

I walk around in
wordless open air.
Note the un-narrated sheen
of obsolescence,
sudden overlay
on the brand new apartment ziggurat
in greenish glass at Grand Army Plaza.
(“You ain’t shit, motherfucker,”
it’s been saying to prewar brick
along Eastern Parkway.)

So now we get a break
from luxury everything?

The day, its denizens
have held up pretty well,
back in my neighborhood,
with women who dress like elsewhere,
maybe even like homemade
stopping to cackle-giggle
under head ties.

Moms who follow the stroller
like a farmer the plow.

And the layabouts and toilers
muttering my queen,
craning around to follow
with habit-blank eyes
the backside of some sweetheart
bumping home from the Laundromat.