Our Place in Cairo

An excited phone call this week from one of our longtime sources in Portland, Maine alerted us to an item in in the latest issue of The New Yorker, which we couldn't miss - a poem entitled Cairo, N.Y. It was a delightful surprise to the Am/Mex team, who owns a house in the said little town located on the northernmost side of the Catskills. Read on...

Cairo, N.Y.

by Cornelius Eady

The town near our house
Isn’t fancy, but it is ripe.
At present, it is still on
The wrong side of
The Hudson River,

But there’s potential.
What happened
In Woodstock,
What happened
In Red Hook,
What’s happening
In Catskill,

Could easily
Happen here.

Our streets are sad
In the way our bodies
Are sad as we
Dream of our
Beautiful selves,

Floating, light,
Light-filled,
Transcendent.

How could anyone
Have missed or
Overlooked us,

Even with our
Bad haircuts,
Our paunchy clothes,
Our gin-mill
Mouths?

One day
Some car drives by
And the rich folk
Who hunt for
Cut-rate rubies
Slow down,

And here we are,
They think,
All ready to be
Scrubbed.