Washington Square, playground of NYU,
and you are in the grass, your shoes and socks
like sloughed snakeskin around you. Speed-chess players
at concrete tables cuss and slap their clocks
as cops with nothing nine-one-one to do
roust dormant derelicts from greenhouse layers
of coats and trash. Nearby, a Gingko tree,
and under it a blonde in horn-rimmed glasses
eating up The Stranger by Camus.

You almost feel at home in this milieu;
for five years now you have been skipping classes,
tipping beers and averaging a ‘C’
to mask your hazardous identity,
the wicked one, known only to a few
code-numbered codgers in the F.B.I.
Somewhere at Quantico a dossier
redacts your selfless service as a fly
collecting wide-eyed snapshots for Defense,
a freak inferno burning evidence,
a ricin prick, a ‘beddy-bye’ bouquet,
and all too often the unlucky guy
sent in the long last seconds of suspense
to snip the ticker and defuse a war.

Who knows? Someday it might be nice to play
one person, but for now you live as two:
student and agent, Mr. Either/Or.

*****

Aaron Poochigian writes: “I think of the ‘Mr. Either/Or’ books as entertainments, airport novels to be devoured like genre fiction. I mixed together Pynchon’s ‘The Crying of Lot 49’, Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers, and the adventures of Mr. Either/Or are what came out. I only hope that they are fun.

“The section published here introduces you to the main character, Zach Berzinski, an FBI agent undercover as an NYU student. This chapter is especially dear to my heart because it describes Washington Square Park with its cast of buskers and undergrads. It’s one of my favorite hang-outs. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp and other Bohemian artists declared the park ‘The free and independent Republic of Bohemia’, a sovereign polity outside of the USA.” 

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and Poetry.
aaronpoochigian.com
americandivine.net