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Not only is Queens without a poet laureate but now Hal Sirowitz, its last poet laureate, has pulled up stakes and moved from his Flushing home to an apartment in Brooklyn's Park Slope.
"My time in Queens is up," Sirowitz says. "Besides," he adds, "being poet laureate in Queens is an invisible position."
Even being a poet, he says, isn't such a hot idea. "It's like saying you're crazy," he sighs.
I asked Sirowitz why he had decided to leave the borough where he grew up, and he says it was his wife's idea. "My wife doesn't like Queens," he says, "and especially Queens Boulevard."
Three years ago, Sirowitz, 55, married writer Mary Minter Krotzer, 40, whom he met at a book party.
The marriage could put his wife into Sirowitz's witty poetry sights somewhere down the line.
On my desk is an autographed copy of his 1996 book of poetry - "Mother Said" (Crown, $15) - and here, in his poem, "Broken Glass," is his view of his beloved mother, Estelle, after he had broken one of her glasses.
Make sure you don't break
another glass
Mother said, while you're
drinking your milk.
When Moses broke the
Ten Commandments,
not only did he have to
climb the mountain again
to get new ones, but God
punished him
by making him wait before
he could visit
...