In a previous poem (Anno Dylani 1969), I alluded to how Dylan Thomas made me want to write. When Wendy and I flew to New York to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary, I wanted to walk in the footsteps of my hero. In 1953, on his fourth tour of the United States in less than three years, Dylan Thomas was not a well man. The people who were supposed to be taking care of him…tour manager…lover and doctor all failed him spectacularly and Dylan died of oedema, fatty liver and bronchopneumonia in a New York hospital.

We visited The Chelsea Hotel, a haunt of the great and good in the New York artworld and Dylan’s home at the time of his death and a visit to The White Horse Tavern, arguably Dylan’s favourite haunt in Greenwich Village. Once there we had a drink in Dylan’s honour.

A DRINK WITH DYLAN THOMAS…NEW YORK 2022

Foot-weary and sightseeing sore

We pad the sidewalks of Manhattan

In search of the Godfather of performance poetry…

The arch-mage of mellifluousness,

Whose perfectly-pitched delivery

Gave power to the poem…

Roared it home, he did!

The last roistering place

Of the “drunken and doomed poet”

His own words and an amplification

Of the role that he took great delight  

To present to the frog-eyed gullible world.

“I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me!”

Sure, he liked a drink or three and where better

Than the White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village

On the corner of Hudson and West 11th Street

The closest he would come to

An old-fashioned Celtic pub in NYC.

And so, we dive beneath

The overarching blossoms of orange and red

And there he is sat at the end of the bar

Framed both in a photo and in his dying;

Most likely…because of the money to be made

By those in charge of a sick man’s welfare,

Lovers and friends who pushed him too far.

Money which would slip through his fingers

All the days of his short sweet life

Unlike the cigarette and the handle

On the beer mug in the portrait.

He looks at me as if to say,

How did you find me?

It’s all there now but the smoke;

Dylan’s haunt in the Village.

Perhaps the dark wood panelling

Recalled nights of the No Sign Wine Bar

Or days spent in the bohemian Kardomah Café

Back across the Atlantic

In his ugly, lovely home town of Swansea?

I go into an adjoining room 

And find him framed once again;

A mirror holds a plea to his dying father.

In the Midtown Manhattan of 1953

It was the Fall of that year;

Dylan was on his fourth American tour

In less than three illness-scarred years.

“I’ve just had eighteen straight whiskies”

Braggart that he was perpetuating the myth

Of this carousing No-good boyo.

The death certificate suggests otherwise.

A battery of bottles stands before me

Lined up beneath a white horse’s head

I order a whiskey on the rocks

“Double?”

“Why not!”

And raise a glass to him that gave me the taste

To put words on the page.

©graylightfoot