I.
The mountains are healing,
The trailers need paint,
The locals know no other place they can stay (they say)
But I walk into a bar in Connellsville
And there’s something in there to feel:
The alcohol aura,
The darkness that clothes you,
The smoke that will follow your soul
As it cries to lay down on the floor.
II.
The jonquil curve out of the gravel
As if to twinkle an eye at me noticing
It, not the humongous tire, or the silo collapsed
Or the seat-less tractor, or the cracked hay barn;
It has no need until I need it,
It can sit there in peace as cars pass by all day
But one look by me at its coy swaying
And a lifetime of longing is left for my eye.
Oh, why must I always get everything wrong?
III.
The smoke before sunset grays the malls
And fills with mist the hairy hills of Aliquippa
With its brown houses;
Left hanging without enough string,
I disappear without anyone noticing.
I watch what looks like my own car
Drive by the window again and again
Like they’re looking for me.
The whole thing
Like an elephant to an anaconda
Too much
For one gulp.
IV.
Interstate 95, on either side
Egrets fly the desolate wilds
Of inhospitable marsh billows,
Manhattan, four miles away
Is like a dim postcard,
Nothing compared to these pipes of fire
And the craned containers that bring in
From New Jersey what makes the city great;
Just as this spindly row of towers
Regnant, bleating red
Is what television really looks like.
V.
The hills of Union City, ringed with cathedrals
And flat-roofed squalor, like a promised land:
The Post Office's faded God Bless America sign,
The Lincoln House, weekly vacancies, the blackest of brick,
The tavern on Paterson Plank Road by the North Fork Bank,
The Fountain Motel, Daffys Clothing Bargains for Millionaires,
The Immaculate Church, immense, gothic,
Like a factory that seems to feed
Into the funeral home next door;
Barbed wire fence beneath the overpass
Then Weehawken Stadium
Below a mongrel crew of duplexes
Formstone, tarpaper, faded masonite
Staring down the Manhattan skyline
Behind the Lincoln Tunnel
Carved out of black rock
Where gnarls of sumac grow upward and obscure.
VI.
In Brooklyn, Hebrew is like candy to the Hasidim,
No rules except those imposed from above.
All the umbrellas are black
Despite jumpsuit-pink hair and blue stocking caps.
They pretend to be happy, but they fear
All they pass: Iceman Jewelers, Books’n’Dolls,
There’s always a deeper terror inside, that this life
May not be the only life.
Many from a distance see this,
Nervously looking for landmarks
Or at least a train to take them back
—After a day here, such joy in going home.
VII.
An excited crowd of men
Shoot pictures of the Batmobile
Outside the hotel
While a pink marble sunset
Never to be repeated
Pulls away from the Secaucus reeds
And the river moves in oily indigo and blue.
It is getting late,
Batman and Robin get into the pool.
VIII.
Above the Thimble Shoals Tunnel
A hideaway of sea roses grows
On rocks that rise from the middle of the ocean
Smooth in shiny water, pocked and dark in mere air;
Here, seaweed floats again, barnacles return to shell homes,
Steak and potatoes are served on paper maps
As 50 miles of bridge degrades into the mist.
One can get lost looking for the edge
Between the ocean and the bay
Behind the steel-wire mesh.
