I'm long accustomed to finding familiar poems, and discovering poems new to me online, usually through one of those poem-a-day services that are more useful than I thought when I found the first one. But this is the only time I've come across a poem whose title is this very day and month. Not only that: I know the place of which the poem is written. I lived long ago, when I was a graduate student at Columbia University, just around a couple of corners. I have no memory of a barber shop there, but I don't know what year the poem was written. I've never heard Vivaldi in a barber shop anywhere or anytime. That alone, I think, would make it my favorite barber shop too. The man seen walking on the sidewalk outside is my age. Though I did not dance often enough in my youth, I do sometimes dance in my mind, and discover myself at other ages.
January 31
by David Lehman
The sky is crumbling into millions of paper dots
the wind blows in my face
so I duck into my favorite barbershop
and listen to Vivaldi and look in the mirror
reflecting the shopfront windows, Broadway
and 104th, and watch the dots blown by the wind
blow into the faces of the walkers outside
& here comes a thin old man swaddled in scarves,
he must be seventy-five, walking slowly,
and in his mind there is a young man dancing,
maybe seventeen years old, on a June evening—
he is that young man, I can tell, watching him walk