How to Stay Cool When It’s So Hot You Want to Die
Libraries
When heat waves hit the city, officials always advise that senior citizens and other people susceptible to heatstroke find refuge in places like libraries. This is yet another example of how essential maintaining our public institutions is to the health of our city’s populace as a whole. But so anyway, the Brooklyn Public Library system is the perfect place to go to escape the heat. Partly because it’s free to enter and use, but mostly because of what you can do once you’re in the library. Here’s a tip: take this opportunity to read. Does that sound obvious? Maybe it does, but that’s ok. And don’t just read anything. No, anything won’t do. Read poetry. Maybe read this Frank O’Hara poem when you’re on your lunch break one hot summer Friday.
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
Click here for a list of the most beautiful public library locations in Brooklyn