a late night beer run at this deli with bricky red awning. that’s all there is to it. then i see this young woman, freshly coiffured, wiping away tears as she leaves the deli without any purchases. the guy behind the counter is talking to someone on his cellphone while watching the small tv ensconced above the cash machine. there is someone else in the bodega, someone who looked totally inebriated, but he is preoccupied with his reflection in the glass door of the cold beverage chiller. auden, in his poem about icarus’ plunge of death in a brughel painting, wrote “how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.”