Someone

By Howard Moss 1922–1987 Howard Moss

You watch the night like a material

Slowly being crammed into a tube of rooms;

It showers into gunshot, pepper, dew,

As if a hand had squeezed it at one end,

Is blank as innocence when daylight comes

Projecting sunlit patches on the wall

That fade. Too much is going on, too much

Of life, you say, for you to live alone

On top of an old tenement, on a train

That might start off sometime, but never does.

Your view is gone. Turn around, and boom!,

A park appears between two fixed ideas

Whose narrow aperture of sky in time

Will house the slums of 1989 . . .

Now New York is feigning its gray dark

London winter. Invisible uptown

Is out there somewhere, raining on its own.

Palmed in the dusty pane, a circle bares

A scene that seems reprinted from the past:

A man with a dog is walking very fast

Along a path among the stunted trees

Of the little square below. He disappears.

Source: New Selected Poems (Atheneum Publishers, 1985)

Biography

Howard Moss was the poetry editor of the New Yorker for almost forty years. In that influential capacity, this quiet, unassuming man was one of the key figures in American letters in the late twentieth century, boosting the careers of many young poets by publishing their work in one of the few mass circulation magazines which bought poetry and paid well for it. Writing in World Literature Today, Ashley Brown observed that "it . . .

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