Hovering over the judicial elections this year is the federal lawsuit that could do away with the judicial conventions, which is where county leaders basically pick judges. With the lawsuit in review, the last thing a party wants to do is be seen playing politics with judicial races.

The one bright spot in the unsavory judicial selection process has been the independent screening panels which determine who is qualified to run in a judicial primary. The panels are used in Manhattan which, this year, has a civil court race with no Democratic candidate.

Hmmm.

Four Democratic candidates went before the committee; three were reported out. The fourth was Shari Michels, daughter of the former Manhattan councilman and Borough President candidate [corrected], Stanley. (Shari was found to be qualified city's bar association.) Only one of the three candidates, Louis Nock, circulated petitions to get on the ballot but, for some reason, never created a committee to fill vacancies.

Hmmm.

When Nock opted not to run, that left the Democrats with no (official) candidate in the race. According to Stanley, that's when elected officials "encouraged" his daughter to make another attempt at the seat. What elected officials encouraged her to run for the seat after the independent screening panel found her unqualified, he wouldn't say.

Without an official party candidate, the Democratic establishment is free to help Michels - who is running as an Equal Justice Party candidate. So now the Democratic Party doesn't look like they're helping elect a Democrat who wasn't approved by the screening panel. If they did, that would have looked like, um, politics.

-- Azi Paybarah

Nevertheless, they were mice, and they had to go. I got a big hatbox, cut a hole, added some sunflower seeds and cilantro—mice apparently enjoy a little Mexican zing—and waited for hours until one ventured in. I transferred it to a jar and sent Paul, my husband, out into the twilight to St. Luke’s churchyard garden. It was a frosty night, so he put the jar in a knit cap before he left.

When he came back he was clutching the jar, still in the hat. “You won’t believe this,” he said. “I tapped the jar at the gate. The mouse didn’t want to leave. I dumped it out and it walked very slowly. I thought, ‘The ground is frozen; I’ve sent the thing to its death.’ It was past the gate, so I couldn’t get it. I thought, ‘If it comes back, I’ll take it back home.’ I put the jar down, and the little thing turned around and slowly came back and got back in the jar.”

I remembered the story of the boy sent out with a cow to sell, only to return with three beans. I was expecting an empty jar, but now I had a mouse! Correction: two mice.

While Paul was out, I had captured this small survivor’s sister with my hatbox. Within two days, I had three more. We bought a 10-gallon terrarium and a running wheel, and Paul built a cardboard lodge with a few rooms. A friend sent a plastic duplex. The mice did lots of cardio. It would get them in shape. We decided to release them in the spring.

May rolled around, and Paul drove me and the mice to Yaddo, the artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs. The mice spun around on their wheel even as the car bumped along. The wee guests lived with me in the “Pink Room” that Truman Capote had once occupied, and I soothed their wheel in perpetual motion with olive oil to keep the maid from hearing it squeak. Writers came to my room for a salon, but even those who regularly expose the dark or alternative side of humankind—i.e., A.M. Homes and Linda Yablonsky—knew nothing of my mice. Edgar Allan Poe may have written “The Raven” at Yaddo, but pets were verboten.

I told only one person my secret, a strange and curious conceptual artist named Melissa. One spring day, Melissa and I carried the terrarium out into the woods. Two daring mice bolted in glee, but the others clung to the wheel: their merry-go-round, their religion and their drug.

Later, Paul said I should have left them the wheel.

It occurred to me that mice (despite Stuart Little, plus Disney’s adorable Mickey and Minnie) are not only unwelcome and feared but violently misunderstood. And yet Picasso had a tame white mouse that lived in a drawer while living in his studio in Paris. Kafka dignified the mouse with his charming short story “Josephine the Singer.” My neighbor, playwright Robert Heide, whose work inspired part of Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, has mice. He thinks they’re cute and, other than keeping his food in jars, does nothing to shoo them. Maybe the true measure of a person’s humanity lies in the way they treat small creatures.

June 2006. During a Gotham monsoon, a mouse the size of a nickel crossed my path on West 10th Street, making a beeline for a restaurant called the Place. A kindly blond boy who worked there gave me a takeout container. The mouse, however, preferred to crawl inside my Italian silk raincoat. Down the street I pleaded for some bread, telling the waiter I had rescued an “animal.” Probably thinking I was homeless, he came back with a large stack of French bread, carefully sliced and wrapped in foil. I found a cab.

At Petco, I scanned the “small animal” shelves and plucked up a small log with several holes, a running wheel and another terrarium. And then I did what no New Yorker I know has ever done: I took the mouse home.

Dr. Amy Kurowski at St. Marks Veterinary Hospital suggested kitten formula, in which I soaked the restaurant bread with a little organic-rice soymilk and flaxseed oil. She also implied that it would be cruel to release Carmen (as I had named her) into the wild, now that she’d gotten used to her easy domestic life. I considered my options.

Plan A: Hamster House in Inwood, run by a young, saintly woman who rescues those oft-tossed little rodents. I could make two donations: one financial, one fuzzy. But when I saw Carmen—tiny white ring around her pink nose—carefully ejecting a piece of poop from her log house, I had second thoughts. Would Hamster House appreciate her excellent hygiene? Would they feed her fresh corn, and almonds and the occasional raspberry?

Plan B: try to palm Carmen off on an eccentric friend. “She probably comes from a long chain of restaurant mice,” said my artist pal Suzan Clark, the former owner of Stanley. A tame country mouse, Stanley: He climbed about her arm and played in her lap. Not so Carmen, who has a feral urban attitude. “How did you tame Stanley?” I asked. “Can you tame Carmen? Do you want her?”

“She needs a better wheel,” Suzan said, “and a cage with bars so she can smell you. See how she stands up on her hind legs to sniff? And mice are social. She needs a friend.”

After finding a mouse-sitter, Paul and I flew to Chicago to visit my father and stepmother, Leon and Takeko, retired professors. In Chicago, Takeko had shared photos Leon had taken of mice he rescued from snakes while working at the Museum of Natural History. “That’s Lester,” he said. Then there was Emmelina, who lived on a mantel and ate watermelon. She did her running on a record player. “She would get tired and jump on the spindle.”

I realized in an instant that my love of mice is genetic. I was simply helplessly following my DNA when I took in these refugees. “How did you tame her?” I asked of Emmelina. “What’s the secret?”

“Oh,” my father said, probably thinking about his new critical text, Things to Come, “I don’t want to talk about that. It’s only a mouse.”

I’ve just gotten off the phone with Suzan, who is considering taking my little mus musculus. In the meantime, I’m stopping by Petco to upgrade Carmen’s wheel. And unless I find another stray mouse pretty soon, I just might buy her a playmate. What can I say? It’s in my blood.

We're halfway through my bridal shower. Having had a few glasses of Chardonnay, I'm not intimidated by this quiz. I know all the dirt, even the name of his first doll or, as he called Stanley, his "buddy." (Sorry Brian!)

"For every correct response you earn a piece of lovely bling," Diane says, displaying a ring purchased from the Liberace Romance collection. The crowd seated before me 'oohs' and 'aahs.' "And for every wrong answer," she continues, "you get a piece of gum--and you have to chew it!" (FYI, I hate gum.)

Joy gazes at me intently and asks: "Let's say you are going out for hamburgers." I nod. "Brian wants you to bring something home for him. What toppings do you request for his burger?"

"I'd get mustard, ketchup, barbecue sauce, cheese, and lettuce," I answer. Joy sighs.

"What about his bacon?" she demands, "and the mushrooms!?" I extend my hand for the Bazooka.

Ten gaudy rings and several Bazookas later, I'm ready for the final question.

"Brian has a favorite exclamation he uses to express frustration," Diane says gravely. "What is it?"

"It's 'Don't ya hate pants!'" I answer with confidence.

"Correct!" Diane shouts. "You can now officially marry our brother!"

OK. Onward and upward.

"Aunt Sadie went BERZERK! NUTS!" recounted Greg's mom.

OK, so I never meant to put anyone in the loony bin, but the event planner/control freak/every detail must be bangin' gremlin who sublets a studio apartment inside my brain is doing double back handsprings right about now.

(picture of save-the-date after the jump)

"In the beginning, I would like to introduce Mr. Stanley Cohen by dialing a number I have with me," said Magdy Mahmoud, chairman of the New Jersey chapter of the American Muslim Union. Mr. Mahmoud held a cell phone up to the microphone, and a gravelly recorded voice that greets callers to the Jewish Defense Organization filled the room:

"Stanley Cohen defended Hamas terrorists and is now defending bin Laden …. Stanley Cohen is a traitor to the Jews, he's a traitor to America. And all the victims of the World Trade Center bombing, all those innocent people of all different backgrounds, their fingers point at this greedy pig Cohen and they scream out for justice."

The voice gave out Mr. Cohen's home address and phone number. It went on: "Stanley Cohen must be driven from New York."

The audience tittered. The Jewish lawyer's bona fides were established-at least for those who hadn't heard of Mr. Cohen already. How he calls a Hamas leader "brother." How he went on CNN with another client, a Muslim cleric with purported ties to Osama bin Laden. How he's compared the investigation of American Muslims in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The men(women watched via closed-circuit television from a back room) had come to learn more about their legal rights in dealing with investigators. Mr. Cohen was there to deliver a simple message: Don't cooperate.

Mr. Cohen grinned. "Greetings to the community; greetings to those people who may work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation or may wish to help them," he began. "Everything we discuss tonight is lawful, truthful and important."

Mr. Cohen, 47, is an old-time agitator-a 60's demonstrator, a disciple of leftist celebrity lawyer William Kunstler. And since the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he's become the unofficial head of a small and increasingly unpopular legal fraternity: defenders of suspected members of Mr. bin Laden's terrorist network. The zeal with which he embraces his cause discomfits even some of his ideological fellow travelers. But the way he sees it, he's all that's standing against a groundswell of anger that threatens to engulf law-abiding Americans.

"This is gonna make the Palmer raids, this is gonna make the McCarthy age look like a meeting of the ACLU," Mr. Cohen says.

He told the mosque about his client, Moataz Al-Hallak, an imam who has become a focus of the F.B.I.'s investigation. During the investigation of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the F.B.I. claimed to have found financial links between Mr. Al- Hallak and Mr. bin Laden-but not enough to indict. One of the congregants of Mr. Al-Hallak's San Antonio mosque, however, was convicted for his involvement. Last year, Mr. Al-Hallak moved to Laurel, Md., where the men who crashed an airline into the Pentagon also lived the last weeks of their lives.

Mr. Cohen said that Mr. Al-Hallak, who has not been charged with anything, is innocent of any wrongdoing. "The story was that Moataz sent money to Osama bin Laden," he said. "Someone who has $300 million, he needs $10,000?" On Mr. Cohen's advice, Mr. Al-Hallak refused to speak to the F.B.I., agreeing only to meet with federal prosecutors.

"Heaven forbid I be accused of telling people not to talk to the F.B.I.," Mr. Cohen said. Then he exhorted the crowd to follow Mr. Al-Hallak's example: "Just say no. It's the safest way."

Exposing the Beast

A few hours before, Mr. Cohen had explained how a Jewish kid from Westchester County ended up defending Islamic militants.

"The strain that sort of runs between and among all of my cases is, I like very much exposing the Beast in a very public and sophisticated way," he said. "It's easy to expose the Beast in the simple cases."

Mr. Cohen was sitting in his modest loft apartment on Avenue D-a neighborhood he loves for its feel of the old, Taxi Driver New York. The walls are covered with framed pictures: Stanley next to Yasir Arafat, Stanley wearing a bandanna over his face, courtroom illustrations of Stanley next to famous clients, Stanley's mug shots. A glass jar filled with spent shell casings sits above his television.

"There was a time when I considered myself a pacifist," Mr. Cohen said.

He grew up in Portchester, a community he described as "a very poor working-class town" sandwiched between Greenwich, Conn., and Rye, N.Y. "My parents are hardworking F.D.R. Democrats," he said. "When I see Death of a Salesman, I think of my father. My mother is a great letter-writer. When she would get indignant, she'd see something that was wrong, she'd write a letter."

As a 16-year-old freshman at Long Island University in 1970, Mr. Cohen got involved in radical politics. "You're 16 years old and you find yourself in the middle of the most intense political period of 100 years," he recalled. "You're young, you're free, you're independent. You go from there."

Gradually he became convinced that, paraphrasing Frederick Douglass, "power concedes nothing without struggle."

"Most of my clients [are] involved with struggle, many of them armed struggle," he said. "I'm not attracted to guns. I'm not a groupie. It's not simplistic. But I understand very well the relationship between the right of self-determination, self-defense and resistance."

After law school, he went to work for the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, defending robbers, rapists and killers. "I loved the people I represented," he said. "Poor people, people of color. People that the system was designed to beat to death."

"He was one of the stars in the office," said Joel Blumenfeld, an acting Queens Supreme Court judge who headed the Legal Aid office at the time.

Along with Kunstler, he helped win a much-publicized acquittal for Larry Davis, a black man accused of robbing and killing drug dealers before shooting his way past police officers for a long spell on the lam. Mr. Cohen became one of Kunstler's protégés, though they feuded at times.

Soon after the Davis trial, Mr. Cohen left the Legal Aid Society and went into private practice, assembling a client list that includes AK-47–toting Mohawk Indian separatists, East Village squatters and Albanian gangsters.

But it's his "Islamic practice," as he calls it, that gets the most attention. Mr. Cohen said he's gotten more than 200 death threats since the World Trade Center attack. One included a faxed photo of someone killed on Sept. 11. On Sept. 23, the Jewish Defense Organization-an offshoot of Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League-handed out fliers with Mr. Cohen's picture on it at memorial services. A spokesman said the group plans to make Mr. Cohen "as famous as Bill Kunstler."

Mr. Cohen makes no apologies. "Look, if I can't support the politics of political clients, I don't take the case," he said. The unabashed brio with which he defends them, however, baffles even some criminal defenders.

"Stanley is very clever, very committed, and can be-I saw this-very charming with prosecutors and judges," said Kevin Doyle, an attorney who shared a windowless Bronx office with Mr. Cohen and now heads the New York State Capital Defender Office. "But I find some of his worldview profoundly bewildering at best."

"Most of [my contemporaries] would think I've crossed the line," Mr. Cohen said. "They may be protégés [of Kunstler], but they consider themselves lawyers.'"

Some raised eyebrows when Mr. Cohen was indicted in Canada for his actions in a Mohawk uprising. "The Canadians alleged, you know, simple stuff: seditious conspiracy, riot, possession of weapons," he said. (Asked how many times he'd been arrested, Mr. Cohen replied: "I dunno-eight, 10.") Others were outraged when, in 1995, Mr. Cohen agreed to help the political leader of Hamas, Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzook, fight extradition from the United States to Israel.

"I know more self-professed progressive lawyers and activists that are so torn up over the Islamic thing," Mr. Cohen said. "Some of them [are] women who rave about 'Oh, if they win I'll have to wear veils and be cleaning floors and having babies.' Some of them [are] very progressive Jewish lawyers, men who, when it comes to Palestine, when it comes to Islam, they're as reactionary as the next guy."

For 22 months, Mr. Cohen visited Mr. Marzook almost nightly in jail. He began to believe in his client, whom he refers to as "the Gerry Adams of Hamas," and his cause-a conviction not lessened by the death of Mr. Cohen's distant Israeli cousin in a suicide-bombing attack. In 1997, Mr. Marzook was allowed to leave the United States. He lives in exile in Syria.

Mr. Cohen said that he's hailed on the street in the West Bank; he once had dinner with Mr. Arafat and was treated, he said, "like a head of state." He believes the C.I.A. monitors his phone calls.

Mr. Cohen is not religious. "My mother stopped asking me to go to temple years ago."

Mr. Blumenfeld, a devout Jew and professed Zionist, understands. "If I weren't a judge, and if I were still practicing, I don't know if I'd have the guts to do what Stanley does," he said. "But every society needs a Stanley Cohen. If the price we pay for that is Stanley's ego, so be it."

Misty View

At sundown, Mr. Cohen turned his Toyota 4Runner onto the on-ramp for the George Washington Bridge, heading toward Paterson.

"Thank God it's misty," he said. "I dreaded this view. I don't want to see it." His paralegal, Sarah, had told him what to expect. "I have been thinking of this view for nine days because I travel this bridge so much. Whenever I come across the bridge and see those two buildings I go, 'All right, I'm home.'"

Like everyone else, Mr. Cohen has a story about where he was on Sept. 11. He had been out late and had fallen asleep on his couch. A phone call awoke him; a friend said to turn on the television.

"Very quickly thereafter I said, 'Yeah, well, here we go,'" he recalled. "I knew it wasn't Timothy McVeigh that they were gonna try to tag."

A day later, F.B.I. agents announced they were looking for Mr. Al-Hallak. The imam, they claimed, foreshadowed the attack when he spoke at his old mosque the weekend before. (Mr. Al-Hallak denies knowing Osama bin Laden.)

On Sept. 22, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials arrested another one of Mr. Cohen's clients, a former board member of an Islamic charity.

"I don't think this was an Osama bin Laden job at all," Mr. Cohen said. "But I think for a lot of reasons the government would prefer it be Osama bin Laden. Because then there's an identifiable bogeyman …. If it ever filtered down to the U.S. body politic that these acts are a result of indigenous struggle and uprising, that there are a lot of people pissed off at the United States for a lot of different reasons, Americans would shit. It's a lot easier to think there's six leaders, kill the six, and then life will be fine again and Doris Day will reign supreme."

Mr. Cohen said one man had called him from Texas to demand that, as an American, he convince his clients to talk. "I said, 'First of all, I'm not an American. Right now, I'm a lawyer' …. And I said, 'The World Trade Centers, they don't belong to the United States; they don't belong to George Bush. They belong to New York City. I live in the country of New York City.'"

Mr. Cohen pulled the car into the parking lot of the mosque, beneath a banner that read "The American Muslim Community Strongly Condemns Terrorism."

Blaming Mossad

Later, Mr. Cohen was nearing the end of his speech: "I fear the government is going to use this as a pretense, and I'm going to use the I-word … to go after those people who have stood up to Israeli interests and the pro-Israel lobby in this country."

At 8:15, the workshop stopped for prayers. Mr. Cohen took a seat in a back office. "This was a Mossad job," he said, referring to the Israeli intelligence service. "This is the biggest boon to Israel ever."

Mr. Cohen said he was joking. "But do I think this operation was assisted by ex-C.I.A., ex-Mossad officers? Absolutely."

Mr. Cohen returned to answer the audience's questions. A remarkable number of the men said they'd already been interviewed in connection with the case. They seemed confused, indignant, terrified.

Afterwards, Mr. Cohen hung around and handed out business cards. Then he got into his car and headed back.

"Damn, it's clear," he said, as he hit the George Washington Bridge. He craned his neck.

"Oh, God …. Oh, my God." Down the Hudson River, the Empire State Building was lit red, white and blue. Beyond it-a void.

"Sarah's right," he said. "It's fucking Los Angeles."

deserted this Thursday afternoon, except for the idling salesmen-a slightly

withered collection of Old World retainer types, each wielding the time-honored

grimace of dispassionate servitude. One glimpse at me, stepping off the elevator

in my Gap knockoffs from Conway, and their eyes wander over my shoulder.

I saunter over to a rack

of suits and begin sorting through them with a distracted regard that suggests

I am right at home. But it's a bluff. Until fairly recently, I was numbered

among New York's homeless population. And though things have since turned

around due to the surprising success of the book I wrote chronicling those

years, I can't quite shake the feeling that it still somehow shows.

As soon as I put my mitts on the goods, a young sales clerk

flies to my side. His precise manner and impeccable grooming bounce off my

rough edges like a reproach.

"Something I can help you

with?" he asks with measured politeness. Considering how close Brooks

Brothers is to Grand Central Terminal-my home until a few short years ago-it is

entirely possible that, in shuttling back and forth to work, this very guy had

glimpsed me scrounging trash bins for redeemable cans. So his inquiry hits my

ears more like, "What are you doing here?"

And well may he ask. Had it not been for Dan Simon, my

editor and publisher at Seven Stories Press (as well as my valued friend), it

would have never occurred to me to invade this bastion of fading WASP

gentility. The whole status-seeking thing, which I felt myself lucky to have

shed during my years on the street, had always left me feeling left out more

often than part of. But I had been invited to the Turner Awards in Atlanta for

their "Coffee With the Authors" event, and

Dan suggested that a hallmark of my recent turn of fortunes might be to

invest in a Brooks Brothers suit.

"It's a Jewish thing," he told me when he saw my eyebrows

lift. "We like dressing up like WASP's."

He assured me that he'd come along, and I imagined that,

with him there as my foil, it might not be so bad. But when we entered the

store, Dan said, "I'll meet you up there," and made a bee line for the back,

leaving me to my own unhoned devices. This is why you now find me floundering

on Brooks Brothers' fourth floor, feeling a sick need to justify my existence

to a sales clerk who wants to know how he can help me, and why I affect a

throaty almost-whisper meant to exude confidence when I reply, "Yes, I'd like

to have a look at some evening suits, if you don't mind."

The clerk merely nods. He dips into the rack and comes up

with what strikes my fashion-challenged eyes as the plainest, boxiest

three-button suit I've ever seen. I don't even want to try it on. I know I'll

only look like a livery driver in the thing.

"Got anything else?" I ask.

His eyes wander the ceiling a bit. He swivels around, taps a

forefinger along the rack and turns back brandishing another ebony three-button

miracle that I would be unable to distinguish from the first at gunpoint.

When I suggest that I might enjoy seeing something other

than black, his eyes fly skyward. "This is not black," he all but scolds. "It's

midnight blue."

"Oh," I say, thinking I get it. Midnight blue. The color of

the sky at midnight, which is-what?-black!

Just then, Dan appears. I nod toward the suit. "Whaddya

think?"

"I think it's lovely," he coos.

I try to find a way to agree, but when I picture myself

wearing the thing, all I see is a black guy trying to look like a Jewish guy

trying to look like a WASP. But Dan's presence emboldens me. I ask the clerk,

"Do you have something with a cut to it?"

"That would get you into

the (ahem) pricier merchandise," he says.

Hearing this, I am now prepared to empty my mid-four-figure

checking account to shoot down any implication that my pocket can't afford what

my eyes covet. Dan and I ascend to the sixth floor, where, as luck would have

it, we get the saleslady from hell, a fading diva-from-Queens type who seems to

regard our patronage as an unconscionable imposition. It takes nearly 20

minutes to nudge her into showing us four of the hundreds of suits on display.

I finally choose a black-green

(midnight green?) suit with a barely detectable windowpane check stitched in

dull gold. But the jacket is too snug for my wide shoulders, so we move to the

tailor's station.

"This is where a Brooks

Brothers suit really gets made," Dan beams, lord of the manor now, conveying

the finer points of the gentry to the uninitiated. Our saleslady only scowls

and pulls out an alteration slip.

"Any chance it'll be ready by Friday?" I ask, remembering

the Turner Awards.

"Absolutely not! Impossible!" she all but barks, tearing the

slip into a dozen angry pieces.

Just then the elevator opens. A pleasant-looking young woman

steps out, then freezes.

"Mr. Stringer!" she

cries loud enough for all to hear. "I'm reading your book! I saw you on Oprah and ran right out and got a copy!

I have it right here." She holds up the book and there, for everyone to see, is

my mug.

"Do you have a card?"

she asks. "I'm sure Stanley would want to meet you. Would it be O.K. to get in

touch with you?"

"No problem at all!" I

assure her, and for the next 10 minutes the three of us huddle in a giddy,

glitzy schmooze. I discover that she is a wardrobe designer; that the "Stanley"

to which she refers is Stanley Tucci; and that they are working on a film, Joe Gould's Secret , that happens to

center on a homeless man written about in The

New Yorker .

After this, Madame

Saleslady is almost civil. As she's toting up the bill, she looks up for a

moment, asks almost shyly, "So, what book did you write?" and breaks into a

smile I would have never thought she had in her. It is entirely genuine-perhaps

a remnant of a once-more-optimistic self, abandoned long ago in a grab for

whatever brass ring, only to be left ravaged and unfulfilled, a riot of New

York knowingness, reduced to playing handmaiden to other people's glory. Little

wonder, then, that when confronting rawer folks like me who give her no obvious

reason to justify her exile to the opposite side of the counter, she can't help

but ooze a certain contempt, to deny herself her own light.

When I glance at the bill, there's another surprise:

Everything is damn near half price. I get out of there less than $700 poorer.

Dan walks me to Grand Central for my train home. Just before

we reach the station, he grins.

"There was something sad about her that you picked up on,"

he says. "Hell," he adds with a laugh, "you were practically ready to hand them

$700 and walk out, you felt so sorry. You'd have been the first homeless person

ever to make a donation to Brooks Brothers!"

On the train, I spot Pierce Brosnan peering out from an ad,

sporting not a watch but a chronometer. I pull back my rumpled Conway sleeve

and rue that it is just a lowly watch I have on my wrist.

Perhaps it's normal for a poet to decorate his studio with the face of a great precursor. But Mr. Kunitz's choice of inspiration is a little odd. Rimbaud, the great French visionary, wrote Une Saison en Enfer and Les Illuminations when he was a teenager, then retired from poetry at 19. He is, famously, the youngest of the great verse writers. Mr. Kunitz, on the other hand, is 94 and quite possibly in the prime of his career. In fact, he may be old enough to earn an even stranger title: the oldest working poet in the history of literature.

This is no exaggeration. For who are the masters who wrote very late into life? There's Thomas Hardy, who died at 88. Robert Frost won his third Pulitzer Prize at age 63, but died at 89. Wordsworth, famed elder statesman of the Romantics?Deadat80. Among the indestructible prose writers, Victor Hugo passed away at 83 and Tolstoy died at 82. Mr. Kunitz's only real competition maybe Sophocles–but according to the most reliable dates we have, Sophocles didn't live past 90. Stanley Kunitz turned 90 way back in 1995.

Asked about his relationship to those poets and writers, Mr. Kunitz said, "Those are masters for me. I think I've at least been true to their spirit, but I would not claim equality–it would be arrogant and insufferable!" He was in his study. He paused to drink from a tall glass of gin and tonic. "I'm a little uncertain how I feel about it. I think longevity is a great virtue, and to live long and to keep one's energy and ardor alive is, I think, unusual to say the least. So I can understand the attention. But I don't think my poems are any better because I'm 94, though it makes them a little rarer."

His age may not necessarily ensure the quality of his verse, but it has certainly not diminished it. Most poets acquainted with Mr. Kunitz's poetry confirm that his work of the past two decades is his strongest. One of his closest friends, and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner, the poet Galway Kinnell, said: "There are precocial poets and there are altricial poets. Some, the precocial, are hatched completely formed, but others are altricial: They are unformed. They don't have feathers. They have to mature a long time before they can fly. There are two classes in the bird kingdom as there are in the kingdom of poets. Stanley developed very slowly. His potential was there, but it was no Saison en Enfer . You see, the Rimbauds were Faustian. They made a bargain with

the devil: Give me 10 years of great and shocking poetry and then I'll die. But Stanley made no such pact. He's worked with other poets to dispel the Faustian nightmare that broods over every poet."

Mr. Kunitz's strategy, according to Mr. Kinnell, is to age by not aging at all. "Some poets, like Wordsworth, became complacent, sure of his powers, a true adult in the negative sense of the word. He lost what Stanley has never lost–a childlike attitude to reality, where he could be continually surprised and taken aback, and in which he could grow."

An afternoon spent with Mr. Kunitz at his summer home in Provincetown, Mass., confirms Mr. Kinnell's theories. Mr. Kunitz spends most of the year in Manhattan, where he and his wife, the painter Elise Asher, live on West 12th Street. But every June, and since 1962, when he bought the house from the town madam, poet and painter come to this cape, where Mr. Kunitz is known more for his flowers and plants than for his age or his verse. He spends every morning tending his garden, a maze of lacecap hydrangeas, crape myrtles, indigo plants and guara, among hundreds of other species. In the garden, he is never old: digging soil, marveling at a hummingbird, ordering rows of plants as if they were poetic lines.

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Mass., in 1905, shortly after the suicide of his father. After studying at Harvard, he came to New York in 1928 and worked for the publisher H.W. Wilson. He published his first book of verse, Intellectual Things , in 1930. He spent several years on a 100-acre farm in Connecticut, then three years in the U.S. Army. In 1945, Mr. Kunitz received a Guggenheim fellowship. He hadn't even applied; Marianne Moore, who had published his work in The Dial , had sponsored him. He taught at Bennington College for a few years and then met Ms. Asher, whom he married in 1958. While other writers of his generation hit upon something in the 1920's Jazz Age or during the Depression, Mr. Kunitz felt more at home among the artists of the 50's.

"They became our closest friends: Rothko, Kline, Motherwell and the rest of them. For most of the year we lived in the Village on 12th Street. Elise and I were living in one of the old brownstones. The Abstract Expressionist painters were mainly the people we saw. Everyone was just beginning a career. There was a sense of great friendship, a lot of dancing and drinking. It was, I'm sure, one of the great periods in American history."

Only in the 50's, when Mr. Kunitz himself was in his 50's, did his career gather force. His Selected Poems, 1928-1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1959. In the years that followed came the Bollingen Prize and other awards. His acclaimed collection The Testing-Tree was published in 1971, Next-to-Last Things in 1985 and, most recently, Passing Through , which won a 1995 National Book Award for the then-90-year-old poet. Along the way, he has been editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a professor at Columbia and the first official state poet of New York. In the past two decades, he has devoted much of his time to two organizations he helped found: the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Poets House in Manhattan. The latter, a SoHo loft space and 35,000-volume library, sponsors readings, organizes programs and encourages community among New York poets.

Mr. Kunitz is not the sort who believes artists should shutter themselves away from society and one another. "There are poets like him, and like Ginsberg, who have a genius of generosity," explained Jason Shinder, another poet who splits his year between New York and Provincetown. "They let people enter their lives." Indeed, one of Mr. Kunitz's favorite phrases–taken from Keats, who alongside Blake, Hopkins and Herrick is one of his great masters–is "negative capability," which denotes the poet's ability to flow into everyone and everything. Or, as Galway Kinnell explained it, "Rilke said, 'There is an ancient enmity between our lives and the great works we do.' Stanley believes in an ancient collaboration between our lives and the works we do."

At his Cape Cod home, Mr. Kunitz said, "What recurs over and over again in my poems, and what is usually at the core of a poem, is the search for renewal. I think that explains a whole lot about my survival." Mr. Kunitz's verse, especially the more recent poems collected in Passing Through , is also masterfully cadent. He laments that "so many of the poets of the current generation don't really hear poetry. They think of it as something on the page. It's a dead music if it's any music at all."

Does his advancing age diminish the aural or visceral experience of his poetry?

"Well, my hearing is obviously not as good as it was, and I'm sensitive to that. My vision used to be miraculous and now it's only fair. But my basic sense as a poet, and as a human being, is the sense of touch. And that doesn't fail me at all; I feel it just as strong today, or even stronger."

He was asked if the older brain works differently in conceiving a poem.

"There is a difference. In youth, your glands write your poems for you in a steady rush and ejaculation. My early poems were delivered to me every morning like the daily newspaper. But that doesn't happen anymore. In age, the poems lie buried under the debris of the life. And you have to dig for them. It's a laborious process, and it takes courage."

"Are you reluctant to have people raise the subject of your age?"

"Well, I joke about it, but I'm aware that it's an unusual aspect of my existence. I've grown so used to it. At the beginning I resisted it, and a couple of years ago, the Sunday Times magazine did a piece about the 'geriatrics': artists and scientists and so forth. I didn't want to be in it, and I didn't write a piece for it, because I don't think it's a unique category. I don't think it stands alone. I feel that my associations are mostly with the young and not with the old. So therefore I don't want to be classified as a 'geriatric poet.'"

Even if that awful phrase puts you in the company of Sophocles, Michelangelo and Hardy?

"Well, those you mentioned all lived to just about 90. So I'm much older than they were. But, you know, there's something pathetic about Hardy. When he was working on his later poems, Winter Words , he wrote a preface in which he celebrated his 89th year. At least that was his intention. But when he came to write it down, he couldn't bear to write '89,' so he left it blank. And the book was published just after he died. I suppose he thought it was inviting disaster to write down the year."

Stanley Kunitz avoids such superstitions, and with a little luck he should be able to maintain his fearlessness well into the next century. He still has two books left in a three-book contract with his publisher.