police dogs roamed the U-Haul trailer lots. In dock areas I found the packing houses, seeking to investigate perspectives pure as theorems, the self-mastery of these concrete structures, invulnerable to melancholy. The weather turned again, spring backing off for glassy distances of sleet, a cancellation of the body's feast of seasons, hard to wake to darkness. I dressed in old sweaters, three or four, each sufficiently torn to offer views of the one beneath but not so torn that all were visible in one wearing. I took great care to vary the layers day to day. One sweater was Opel's, a ski extravaganza, desperately out of place among the rock 'n' roll caftans at the back of the closet. I never ventured north of Cooper Square. Two deaf men had an argument near a construction shack, using their hands to curse each other, finally picking up boards and taking turns attacking. Never ventured north of Cooper Square but stood above the rivers east and west, wod-or, this double sound all I could fashion from the sight of sluggish currents in transit to the sea.

This one day of late rain I saw a toothless man circle a cart banked with glowing produce. He bellowed into the wind, one of nature's raw warriors, flapping around in unbuckled galoshes. A few people huddled nearby. One would now and then extend a hand toward the cart, finger-pricing, as the man wailed to the blank windows above him. It was a religious cry he produced, evocative of mosques and quaking sunsets.

RED YAPPLES GREEN YAPPLES GOLDEN YAP-PLES MAKE A YAPPLE PIE MAKE ALSO A YAPPLE STRUDEL YAPPLES YAPPLES YAPPLES BIG JUICY YAPPLES FROM THE HEART OF THE YAPPLE COUNTRY

I turned a corner and someone came out of an old hotel and ran in sputtering little steps to my side. It was the girl Skippy, Happy Valley's emissary, original bearer of the plain brown package. I kept walking and she remained alongside. We headed south and east into narrower streets, the city's older precincts, less here of surfaces, of broad lines, the women pinned in little windows, forty years flowing through an isolated second, their true lives taking place in a European pastureland. A neon digit, sizzling a bit, hung lopsided from the front of a luncheonette. It grew colder as the wind gripped in and the island tapered toward the bay. Secure I felt beneath my sweaters. Skippy coughing.

The oldest immigrants lived in tower blocks, a long way from fertile pavement, these streets now ruled by darker races of the plains. It was early afternoon and soon to rain, nondeliverance in the air, a chemical smell from the river. The bridges were cruelly beautiful in this weather, gray ladies nearly dead to all the poetry written in their names. Tall black kids in sneakers charged up out of the subway, cutting left and right across a street, fast-breaking, three on two, one of them turning now in the air, ancient stick-fingers tapping a parking sign. A man demanded money, sitting on the arm of an abandoned chair, its springs exposed. I kept forgetting Skippy was with me, then would turn to see her, body bent forward in a coughing spasm, head pointed, moving like a dog in water. We walked behind two resplendent little women wearing plastic liners over their hats, coats and shoes, one of them loudly cataloguing various items along the sidewalk.

NEWSPAPER VOMIT SHIT GLASS CARDBOARD BOTTLE SHIT SPIT NEWSPAPER GLASS SHIT GARBAGE BOTTLE CARTON BOTTLE PAPER STOCKING SHIT GARBAGE SHIT GARBAGE GARBAGE SHIT

In barbershops Latin men stood talking in button-down shirts with collars open and sleeves folded two cuff-lengths to the lower forearm, apparel of an earlier Madison Avenue, that somber street now freshly regimented, paunchy and gay in Kool-Aid fiesta colors and Spanish sideburns. We headed west from the bridge districts and reached Chinatown, where Skippy seemed confused, apparently thinking this was San Francisco, and had to calm herself by standing for a while before the window of a fish market, watching a man guide a jagged blade up the belly of a trout as bits of fishy insides dripped onto the flaked ice. We hurried into the Criminal Court Building for warmth and sweets. The lobby was crowded and noisy, a chorus of the accused, the counter-accused, the victimized, and the lawyers, families and friends of all of these. With it all, more irate than the rest, came that special whine of minor violators. Everybody was smoking, shouting, biting down on stony Chiclets, sucking cough drops, everybody but the pimps, regal and absolute, who merely scanned the landscape, property-hunting. Behind his counter the blind newsdealer loomed as justice does, something of a self-parody, appearing to sense every nuance in the hall. He lived through his fingers, working their heat into every coin, tapping out change for the doomed and for the brothers-in-law of the doomed. We bought some candy and stood in a corner. Short purposeful men crossed the lobby on their way to and from duty, each slightly overweight and carrying the Daily News folded under one arm, civil servants, custodians of some kind, herders of jury members from room to room. I licked chocolate from the heel of my hand. A family of blacks surrounded a pustular lawyer, crowding his panicked grin. Outside we saw a man with hands to eyes in the shape of binoculars and he was slowly turning on a street corner, clouds, taxis, birds, detectives, all nautically viewed by this revolving man, once drunk perhaps but well beyond that now, persevering, in full command, sensing he had found a way of dealing with the world. We walked down to the Battery, past all the forty-story objects. Wind seemed to drop directly down the flanks of buildings before ripping along the narrow streets and we passed men clutching their black hats and moving shoulder first in quick bursts of locomotion and sometimes even backward, ten or twelve men at a time, their briefcases filled with mergers,............