Alfred Corn’s poem, Hudson Heights, appeared in NER 20.2 (1999):
The twain do sometimes meet, desert light
and drynessa brilliant match for this year’s rainless fall,
gold leaves cycling down from their hardwoods,
while one last catbird gears up for the crips flight south.
The married woman strolling among reckless
yellow pinwheels still finds in them a surprise equal
to the first a northeastern autumn sprang
on someone who, as a girl, had run and screamed
through sprinklers on a lawn in La Jolla.
Labor Day, her youngest packed and left
for school, in his wake, the famous “empty nest
syndrome.” Which helps explain tingling magnetic fields
that lately center around Joaquín of Hudson Hardware—
his nostalgic Spanish voice, his eyes’ respectful guesswork . . .