“Would you like to go to this?” she asked, looking at the flyer. “I know the place. I used to read there quite a bit at one time.”

They were standing beneath a hedgerow. They stared at each other, daunted by the challenge of forging a new alphabet to create the new words to describe this new feeling that was causing their skin to gooseflesh. Stymied, they reached out and held hands and began to kiss slowly, braiding their tongues like a poet plaits metaphors.

After walking down a hill through the urban campus of the Watchtower Society, they came to Old Fulton Street, whose old brick buildings had been turned into restaurants and bars. Holding hands, she led him as they ran across the wide street like kids on a great adventure, first to the median, then through traffic to the other side.

They walked down the gradient toward the river and the old ferry landing, which was marked by a lighthouse and a jetty—a narrow strip of planks where a wedding was taking place on the roof deck of a moored white barge that was strung with balloons and flowers. Beyond the barge, across the river the twinkling skyscrapers seemed to be moving toward them like a hundred tornadoes of light.

Just before they reached the lighthouse she led him round a corner, into a different world, a different time. Behind them was blacktop; here they walked on cobblestones crisscrossed by trolley tracks. Passing under the Brooklyn Bridge, they slithered past the skeletons of old warehouses and rehabbed factories, occupied now by photographers and artists, and filed beneath the Manhattan Bridge, continuing now along silent streets with broken hydrants and pavements overgrown with weeds. They stopped now and then in doorways to kiss and rub against each other, commingling their fluids and scents, till they arrived at a low brick building with arched metal doors, where a crowd of mostly young people were comparing the work of Baraka and Ginsberg. “But neither of them could exist without the jazz poetry of Langston Hughes,” a newcomer said. “So y’all better get him up in there.”

They paid their five-fifty and climbed a flight of dusty stairs to a third-floor performance space dreamily lit by hundreds of candles fixed in bundles to the chipped and moldy walls. Wading through the tide of dreadheads and baldies they stopped at the bar—two sawhorses and a sheet of ply—and got a lager for her and a stout for him and found a corner in the back, by a window ledge; there she sat with her legs apart and drew him into her private space.

Claiming him completely now she rested against his back, her chin on his shoulder, knotted her ankles in front of him and chilled. As a kid with yellow glasses freestyled with a three-piece band comprised of turntables, harmonica, and electric guitar, Sylvia wondered if Fire had noticed that she’d answered yes to the question: Do you feel like reading tonight?