Lower Level, Grand Central Terminal

It seems wrong.
He follows me into the men's room
and unzips.
I glare at the cracked blue capillaries
in the ghostly porcelian
standing like an open coffin
before my boy's eyes.
Grand Central Terminal
is a patrician,
rank and seedy;
the Yankees fly in airplanes now.
There is no one else here.
I garble "no" to a question
I never really hear
and run,
fear
transporting me up the ramp,
past the bookstall that sells
The Evergreen Review,
to the street.
I suck in
the air of survival.
I tell no one.
I should not have been there.
II.
9/11 is raw.
Automatic weapons jut above backpacks;
fatigues weave through suits
dancing the waltz of Return to Normalcy.
I don't think I've ever noticed
the police desk outside the restrooms.
The food court is waking up.
Curry and pastry
tantalize my empty stomach;
clinks and sizzling and spatulas
sound in my sleepless ears.
I am conflicted.
My sphincter pulses.
I'm scared.
Should I file a report?
Should I leave a picture?
Is Carrick really missing
if she's where she thinks
she wants to be?
What if they find a body
and don't know
to whom it belongs?
III.
Down ten milligrams of methadone
as she starts to withdraw,
Carrick sweats on the platform
as we wait for the 5:58.
We will meet Deirdre in front
of the New York Public Library.
Four years have passed.
We are intact.
Carrick hands me her iPod
to listen to "All of Me"
performed by a throwback band
she has befriended in Central Park.
She is sharing her music again.
A strap on Carrick's bodice rips
as she scratches her back,
and gives me that goofy look.
At the terminal,
we buy thread
and a needle
at Rite Aid,
and unconsciously set up shop
ten yards from the police desk,
which is just outside the rest rooms.
I am not aware of soldiers.
I jab at the strap
and pull the thread through
the fabric
in jagged loops.
It occurs to me
that this space is sacred.
It contains multitudes.
We hear Harold Bloom
propound on Walt Whitman's
autoerotic tendencies
before two stentorian voices
devoid of New York
make Leaves of Grass sound
like drawing-room poetry.
We laugh and chide
on the bus ride to Deirdre's car.
No one wants to hear me propound.
Deirdre stifles her cough;
Carrick wants an East Side penthouse
and a mansion on North Broadway in Yonkers
where she will let graffiti artists tag her stone walls
with flowers.
I reflect on Whitman and
am reminded of our epitaphs —
or mine, at least —
If you want us again, look for us under your boot-soles,
and that's just fine and dandy,
as Pop would say.