UNIVERSAL MART (JERSEY CITY) (1988)

I.

Loew's copper marquee, its tracery of bulbs smashed,
frames empty letter guides, except one panel, announcing
No features. Closed for renovation. Open soon.

The owner bought Loew's for a song, and has sectioned
its shadows into office space for the future--
already legs of typists hang from swivel chairs

and their desks are overcrowded with bouquets
or fruitbaskets, or babies in bonnets, or dead dogs
they loved once, or husbands smiling from casinos.

In the developer's mind glows an ocean-blue of monitors,
technicality: the city insists Loew's be a theater,
that it stay a theater--so the city battles the owner,

the plywood face of the theater concealing seat-rows
upturned like false teeth, among toppled Ionic pillars.
Has the curtain been gathered, was its scarlet heap

discarded in laundry-chutes as jackhammers shattered
the spectacle it veiled? The wrecking crew has asked aloud
what those who paid for them will bring to desolation.


II.

But across Loew's, the manager of Universal Mart
considers how value dances over the visible face
of Journal Square, all wrecked facades and billboards,

canvas sheets and scaffolds obstructing the sidewalk
that leads to the bargain store, where citizens
buy things woven from the recycled plastic of milk-jugs--

and plaster-smeared heaps gathered in backlot dumpsters
where crews discard the scalloped detritus of art-deco,
a caryatid backed by shell, a mealy fat acanthus spear.

He cannot ban the moisture blackening his onions
or the sponginess of Idahos. Ziggurats of mangoes and romes
shrink while mounds of change palmed of brilliance swell.

Nor can he stiffen wilted lettuce-leaves, nor
exorcize the mold from whole-wheat bread, nor keep
the leeks from drooping, unsour milk, retard the spoilage.

After closing, he rebuilds the pyramids of fruit
into diminished versions of themselves, and thinks
how much the key to wealth is scarcity, how one should never

offer what was yours for free. Usually he thinks such things
while turning out lights that illuminate aisles
of dated wares, overpriced or padded, he knows the old must buy,

or wiping business, simply business, from battered weighscales.