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The Cafe on the Corner of Macdougal and Bleeker By Nathaniel Goldberg Copyright 2000 Nathaniel Goldberg

A poem about happenings at a Greenwich Village cafe.

Artists came all night to sketch or play chess with a fevered vengeance amidst flaring tempers, fists banging table tops, beer or wine spilling to the hard wood floor. A queen, a knight a trembling pawn tumbled. I used to go there every night staying till dawn to gather wisdom like so many coins in a jar. Amongst the artists, the writers, the actors, the Joycian novelist the bearded ones, the ragged con-men drifting in and out all night, I saw Jesus pull a fifty out of his pocket and give it to a blind poet who looked like Walt Whitman in his older years. The tables and chairs are now gone. The tree out back is dead. The Cafe is dark and no longer breathes.