New York City Oct. 2023

The room on East 36^th

was teeming with Irishman,

many with pens who knew

full-well how to use them.

The piper leaned into his crying pipes.

The foam floated over the black.

The food was being ignored.

We each seemed to have become old men,

memories crowding out Panglossian

yearnings for a fragrant tomorrow.

My wife said that she was thinking she 

knew this one old guy from somewhere,

His long-furrowed face a sphinx 

under a broad-brimmed fedora, 

that pirouetted over the stylus of

an eloquent ebony walking stick. 

Bones cloaked in deep magenta velvet,

nested in the depth of a leather banquette,

Gay Talese, the man himself, gestured the 

lady toward a vacant seat at his side, the

ninety-one year-old hot-blooded Italian 

author indeed of Thy Neighbor’s Wife among

three-score and some blathering Irishman, 

their fists full of stories and black beer.

Having welcomed his inspiration, 

Gay Talese set to running a bony 

hand along her soft length of leg.

Lesser men might have been left

nursing the angry pink flare of a 

female handprint on the jawline.

 Another man might have boldly

called him out into the street, 

imploring the lady to hold his beer. 

But Gay Talese and the poet resisted 

the pathetic urgings of a literary conflict 

they might have both long lamented.

            

Here he truly was, Gay Talese, 

icon of piquant Esquire bylines and

All the News That’s Fit to Print, 

granted clemency by the poet-husband 

of the fair and tender lady, who now

had fodder and some good god-damned 

luscious scrap of tattle to crow about.

---

Daniel Thomas Moran is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, including publications by Salmon Poetry, Poetry Salzburg and The University of Bucharest. He has had some four hundred-fifty poems published in more than twenty countries. He is the former poet laureate of Suffolk County, NY.