The Rites of Manhood 
    It's snowing hard enough that the taxis aren't running.
    I'm walking home, my night's work finished,
    long after midnight, with the whole city to myself,
    when across the street I see a very young American sailor
    standing over a girl who's kneeling on the sidewalk
    and refuses to get up although he's yelling at her
    to tell him where she lives so he can take her there
    before they both freeze. The pair of them are drunk
    and my guess is he picked her up in a bar
    and later they got separated from his buddies
    and at first it was great fun to play at being
    an old salt at liberty in a port full of women with
    hinges on their heels, but by now he wants only to
    find a solution to the infinitely complex
    problem of what to do about her before he falls into
    the hands of the police or the shore patrol
    -- and what keeps this from being squalid is
    what's happening to him inside:
    if there were other sailors here
    it would be possible for him
    to abandon her where she is and joke about it
    later, but he's alone and the guilt can't be
    divided into small forgettable pieces;
    he's finding out what it means
    to be a man and how different it is
    from the way that only hours ago he imagined it.

                          Alden Nowlan