I just found this damn old thing I wrote last May. I thought it was cute.

Right now I’m a little drunk and restless on the thoughts of things I can’t yet imagine. I’ve had endless dreams of leaving, and today I bought a ticket. It is ludicrous to realize that my ambitions have shrunken to the actuality of packing, of moving-of this thing I’ve been chasing with foolish prospects for so many years. I need to spend these last days grasping haunts and grappling with the skeletons of plans never carried to their term. Right now I am content, but that is too rough and unfamiliar a territory to appreciate. Right now I am sitting on the back porch of Erica’s apartment, listening to her dad’s lyrics over crickets screeching in ankle-length grass. And his voice grows over the fence and screams beyond the streetlights; the speaker volume up to nine and loud enough to let loose all kinds of lyrics on Third Avenue and awaken in me memories of my college years, of the friendships that have faded or festered into love. He is baritone, oaky, and agreed by Erica’s high-heel tapping out a well worn rhythm on the concrete stoop. Cloves stubbed out on the curb and Blue Moon bottles strewn around the mess of our cluttered recollections. I’m wearing a sweater that was once silk, but was washed and now remains a bunch of coarse knit fibers still carrying that label. It’s chilly, but I’ve the warmth of cigarettes and alcohol to keep me comfortable. I’m working on the last call of heady good-byes-dramatizing the lows, the exasperating farewells that are going to erupt to an epic escape from the saw palm city I refuse to claim as my own. I am holding my breath until I’m on that Greyhound to Chicago, till I can do nothing but exhale sentiments to the cool blue bus window and leave all the fears I’ve held in my lungs these years as steam stains on the glass panes. I have rehearsed the way I’ll press the tip of my nose and my palms southward bound and think of my hometown-of twenty years that have encompassed memories long, unrivaled-because I could unravel myself and find similarities lengthy and unkempt when I hear talk of other states, but my history will always be my own. This identity, persistent, no matter the state I’m in. I will say to that bus window: I am not running away, though you did say I would. You told me I would never find happiness if I kept running, but I’ve stayed close all these years and the only thing I’ve gained is distance. So, dear city, I need space and it will be hard to leave, binding the impetus of something you said I couldn’t do, but I love you. I always will, as I know you feel for me and your concern has always carried over the vastness of life. It won’t stop simply because we’re thousands of miles apart. But if I don’t leave now, we’ll never catch the ways we’ve already come undone.

#2

New Orleans, May 6

 

I feel myself choking

but here, you hold your breath anyway:

there’s something in the air

that settles thin, a dustcover over lungs-

the chemical debris,

a condition of the sunken,

bloated city.

It has been two summers

since the storm. Once teeming

with the rowdy cleanup

that raised fists in rage at inequity,

these wards house now

molding couches, while those

who came have returned to college

in the Midwest, where they might put

the weeks away in essays, diaries-

and put some distance between themselves

and the sad state of things down in Louisiana.

This is just a stopover, for me;

I vacate from the Greyhound station.

All that I’ve held  

is exhaled to the cool blue bus window.

I press the tip of my nose and my palms south

and consider that corridor, the Ninth Ward-

drownings marked on every door.

And whatever has nested in my chest,

like these things, will not be shaken.  

Final Draft, 1st Poem

Pensacola, May 5

 

Tonight,

tucked in the thicket of
this gentle, slumbering wood
sleep disrobes himself upon a chilly gulf.
Suckling cypress knobs near to a milky moon,
I hung with him and bluegrass belles

humming gospel spells under a canopy of palms
sputtering hymns ’low the glittering light.
Goodnight to the prose of friends

further estranged by each gaining hour.
Here, we are to them but a suggestion

and a territory, bleak and undefined:

the distance between yesterday’s homestead

and the rest of un-rendered summer.
Between ourselves and westward,
there is this city, built on swampland

this beach, vacant as a last breath
alive as ecstasy and murmuring

it’s final tidings till I arrive in California.

Hear, America.

open those thrashing, naked  arms
and let me migrate  with momentum,

to move about and abdicate from this lonely habitat.

I.
At our first introduction,
he was a construct
of his students,
who had put him back together
with glue
cement, and concrete pilings
and likend it to art.
In a landscape derelict
of natural expression
he mimicked the real thing
but without context
he lived in a metaphor
that lacked the language
to explain it. So he called
the instance “Non-Site”
and it served no function
but its own existence.

The night bristles
then bursts
into a symphony of crowbars
beating down tinted glass.
Sounding as the nightengale,
the broadsided Volkswagon
starts its chorus of alarm.

Then the nocturnal journey
of your palm begins
it’s crawl along my breadth of thigh,
clasping my knee with your linked thumbs.
If there is a union in the breathing
of the others,
then we will know that they have settled
and we will make our bed in the tub,
and pull the tap to cover
our noises and cool
the flushing of your cheeks.

Or if they are not yet asleep
then we will nest on the stairs
of the fire escape, between stories
and play with sounds adhering
to the sirens, the battering of cars
below, the pack of browbeaters
patrolling the street; city sounds.

If you are exhausted, then sleep
will floor you past lunchtime.
In the afternoon, I will find our company
at work, tinkering with the intricacies
of machines; grinding gears
and threading cables.

I will complain to you
the change of seasons
has passed, unnoticed
outside this building. Soon
it will be too hot to leave.

Until then, I unspool days
with abandon; unletting them
from my nervous grasp
on a pilgrimage past
the punctured cars;
dodging puddles that have fallen
from their gaping windows.

She meets us halfway up the highest hill in Oklahoma
where I have succumbed weak-kneed to walking
with the chainguard chafing softly against my shin.
Her husband is poised at the top to steal a photo,
so that I am suspended on this vertices indefinitely,
as Sisyphus pushing the weight of his world
up the interminable incline.
She is brawny, tawny-haired and tan:
salt and peppered with a tongue that
sounds like bratwurst sizzling.
Her thick German lingers behind with us
as we lag at her heels while she rides
through rush hour traffic.
She stops at a house in the suburbs
of four garages, five bedrooms,
a state-of-the-art alarm system
and no pets, no children.
she feeds us Spaken in trade
for tales of stealth camping
behind Illinois state penitentary
of Neil Gunton
and of the fiberglass whale in Catoosa;
among other roadside attractions,
The way her husband folds his arms across
his broad, flat breast and grunts at us
reminds me of my late grandfather
after he lost the War.
She shows us to our room
and I get nauseous at the
spangled red, white and blue wallpaper
and it’s fangled patriotism.
Moni knocks and
offers to take us out to Baum’s;
the best frozen yogurt in the west
or so she brags.
Julian and I
keep to ourselves the secret
that we have already eaten at three
Baums since crossing in from Kansas.
So she buys us each a cone
and in the booth confesses
that she peed once behind a gas station
in Billings, Montana where the attendant
refused a key to non-paying customers
and about the two months she
spent alone traveling across the Northern Tier
and about her husband, an austere
agent of the American government
who bought her independence.
Then I understand the wallpaper.
She leans back, sagely, with her cone
and says,
“Never be afraid to ask,
the worst you’ll hear is no”.

I have four days to write ten poems;

however,

my professor just unloaded buckets of compliments on me.

I’ll take a shot of caution with my pride:

The best students are always failing…

June eighteenth:

static clings to the dry earth

when the pressure drops

mid-evening in Choctaw, OK.

It was calm at dinner.

I licked my plate clean of garlic butter

the wife washed the dishes. I could tell

a mounting worry in her voice,

as she spoke of other women

and wrung her hands

on the towel beside the sink.

her husband had gone out

to tie down the equipment

close the storm doors,

secure the shutters.

there was a hacking in maize fields

as the wind crossed the state

and she turned on the television.

the reception was bad.

she furrowed her brow

at the turn of the weather.

We spent that night in the barn

but I barely slept.

in the dark, the rain came

and I watched from the loft

where I perched my head

above the air conditioning unit.

I saw the lightening splinter

and spill across the swelling ground.

the torrents struck and pounded, deafening.

in the midst of violence,

we moved our sleeping gear downstairs.

I tried to recall whether I was to listen

for the whistle or the wheels that would warn us.

I stayed awake, and kept an ear

for freight trains.

the Red River breached is banks

and glutted its continent to the currents

and four were killed that night, a hundred miles

south in Texas. And the Midwest,

which had staved off the thought of thirst

for many months, drank in all the runoff

and was breaking into green

as we pedaled towards Oklahoma City

in the morning.

 

Because I am writing about America
I have surrounded myself with maps.
I hope to remember better by these
but there is only so much
books and photographs can do
to summon prodigal thoughts
when the things I wish to call home
are in details
flung and scattered in between
as the mixed pieces of unknown
kin sent back in burial bags.
There are is a box of specimens
collected from bits of conversation
epigraphs of aims and small instances:
the spread of sun rash across my shoulders
the thresh of rain against a tin roof
the winking city across the East River.
All these reminding me of
my own reflection, glancing
off the glass at the Field Museum
where unnaturally grouped
stuffed skylarks, waxed Paw-Paws
and velvet goosberries made their
austere habitat from the strange
and useless cabinets, outside context.

Memorial Day, 2007 has been captured in my memory
as the expenditure of light as it bounced and dappled
across the platform at Waukegan station. It was Monday
and we had an all-weekend pass that had been the same
price as a one-day fare. My friend gave his unused ticket
to a vet at the station. I kept mine, and it comes up occasionally
worn, and superfluous; forever linty and stuck
between punch cards and metro stubs.
Took the northerly route as it passes Kenosha county line
into Wisconsin, the real province of milk and honey bees,
of Holstein, hops, corn on the cob and men on lawn mowers:
an abundant population of white, male homeowners,
some of whom scoffed as we rode through their back yards,
where the trail runs aft of Wal-Marts and strip malls,
between wheat fields and suburban outcroppings.
Milwaukee is a long, girthy settlement. We tripped
on its outskirts just before night and so lay our things
down in the dark part of a city park on its edge;
still forested, but with a cap of high-rises in the distance
and slept in fits, listening to the confusion of wilderness
or the footing of night watchmen, who are hungry to evict.
Before sunup we were gone, and we sat atop Calvary to see
a magnificent sunrise; the city gleaming at dawn and embanked
by the shores of Lake Michigan. That afternoon we
caught sleep in down and dandelion
dander, and lay under a cover of sycamore boughs
and sweet gums. Lulled to the murmur of
sailboats strapped to the docks on the harbor
on a grassy knoll by some school we surveyed
the verge of summer where a track field had gone vacant,
already weedy and the yard, empty. I let dust particles settle
on my skin. It was too bright, almost, to breathe.