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COMING BACK TO AMERICA
- Wesleyan University Press
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COMING BACK TO AMERICA We descended the first night from Europe riding the ship's sling Into the basement. Forty floors of home weighed on us. We broke through To a room, and fell to drinking madly with all those boozing, reading The Gideon Bible in a dazzle of homecoming scripture Assyrian armies The scythes of chariots blazing like the windows of the city all cast Into our eyes in all-night squinting barbaric rays of violent unavoidable glory. There were a "million dollars in ice cubes'7 outside our metal door; The dead water clattered down hour after hour as we fought with salesmen For the little blocks that would make whole our long savage drinks. I took a swaying shower, and we packed the whole bathroom of towels into Our dusty luggage, battling paid-for opulence with whatever weapon Came to hand. We slept; I woke up early, knowing that I was suffering But why not. My breath would not stir, nor the room's. I sweated Ice in the closeness my head hurt with the Sleep of a Thousand Lights That the green baize drapes could not darken. I got up, bearing Everything found my sharp Roman shoes went out following signs That said SWIMMING POOL. Flashing bulbs on a red-eyed panel, I passed Through ceiling after ceiling of sleeping salesmen and whores, and came out On the roof. The pool water trembled with the few in their rooms Still making love. This was air. A skinny girl lifeguard worked At her nails; the dawh shone on her right leg in a healthy, twistedflame. It made me squint slick and lacquered with scars with the wild smoky city Around it the great breath to be drawn above sleepers the hazy Morning towers. We sat and talked she said a five-car wreck Of taxis in Bensonhurst had knocked her out and taken her kneecap But nothing else. I pondered this the sun shook off a last heavy Hotel and she leapt and was in the fragile green pool as though I were still sleeping it off eleven floors under her: she turned in a water 286 Ballet by herself graceful unredeemable her tough face exactly As beautiful and integral as the sun come out of the city. Vulnerable, Hurt in my country's murderous speed, she moved and I would have taken Her in my arms in water throbbing with the passion of travelling men, Unkillable, both of us, at forty stories in the morning and could have Flown with her our weightlessness preserved by the magic pool drawn from Under the streets out of that pond passing over the meaningless Guardrail feeling the whole air pulse like water sleepless with desperate Love-making lifting us out of sleep into the city summer dawn Of hundreds of feet of gray space spinning with pigeons now under Us among new panels of sun in the buildings blasting light silently Back and forth across streets between them : could have moved with her In all this over the floods of glare raised up in sheets the gauze Distances where warehouses strove to become over the ship I had ridden Home in riding gently whitely beneath. Ah, lift us, green City water, as weturn the harbor around with our legs lazily changing The plan of the city with motions like thistles like the majestic swirl Of soot the winged seed of pigeons and so would have held her As I held my head a-stammer with light defending it against the terrible Morning sun of drinkers in that pain, exhalting in the blind notion Of cradling her somewhere above ships and buses in the air like a water Ballet dancing deep among the dawn buildings in a purely private Embrace of impossibility a love that could not have been guessed: Woman being idea temple dancer tough girl from Bensonhurst With a knee rebuilt out of sunlight returned-to amazement O claspable Symbol the unforeseen on home ground The thing that sustains us forever In other places! Falling 2 8 7 ...