Seeing Paul on Madison Avenue
McCartney, not the apostle, and me
walking past Vera Wang or Michael Kors
that small blip of Manhattan, up past the hum
of trucks and bicycle slice, that part that seems more
grown-up, subdued. Just like adulthood buffered
me, but there was Paul, bigger than my I Love Paul
button, bigger than the Ed Sullivan show, and teen-aged
me was whispering it’s him, it’s him, and it was, and
the whole universe shrinking down to a shiver. I might
have said hello, I don’t recall because everything was
cotton-stopped, the taxicabs were yellow submarines,
the crosswalks Abbey Road. I floated home that afternoon,
thinking how impossible that would have been–Paul walking
anywhere unmobbed, the city around me suddenly hushed.