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Travel Log

That time in Buffalo sure drifts off
Or when, in where-the-fuck-did-you-live, some colder side of town
As students, when we wrote and read and loved and hated
I always thought things would better

I’ve just had the hardest day

Hawaiian music cannot vanish that scar
Pushing and pulling even seem static.

Let’s see if I have it in me to list more cities:
(Even if I know you’re in some smug Swiss Alpless crotch)

Plymouth Rock, among the huge loss of sea
Northampton, speaking of smug
Zeke and David, aloof junior dinosaurs I hankered Berryman to,
on ludes and booze, until they dragged me out to the bus
What a sad glory to witness. Onto Boston.

Up Spring Garden where those girls I loved lived
Petty burgs of Pitt, eastern and western PA and Allentown let me down
Jenny’s suburb of it
Or Cold Boston where I bought a dictionary, Montreal of spicy soup
My eager coins tear-dropped toward Vegas after
Cherokee, Winooski

Busward, trainward on the polar express
Each smoky lonely dawn a station
The blue necklace a girl tried to steal from me at the dog pound
Or North Winooski, where I broke that kid’s string
I always hated answering the phone
Desolate Prescott, heavenly Ghost Ranch glittering trucks and sky
Evil Witch-ataw
Deviling brings ends to us, in the carwash was all Hawaiian again
A Big Boy’s, an IHOP, A City Line Roy Roger’s on opiates
Caravans tucked down the middle of it

Burlington was safe asylum, Cohen crouched on a rock on Church Street
In Santa Fe he played air guitar, a wall of noise
As his father disappeared in science and slurring
I slowly dream of now and then
Washing my hair in the culvert pipe
Breathless icy force.
Outside the Brussels airport I slept on the grass
In a Bronx hotel I didn’t at all
Canvas scattered with its sound
I gave up a girl on a seaside, Longport or Long beach or Long island
Where that legacy first hatched
Williamsburg, Fiumicino, Plymouth, Edgartown.
I was through and past Schenectedy, Albany
The thruway not unlike the northeast extension
Or many turnpikes in the snow-ly, beef jerky drive.
I did ferry over Champlain, who ever knows why
After walking for so many days in the rain of Mount Desert Island
Of the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Adirondack
The cabin-eating bears and fleeing cub scouts
The hot trailblazer in her bean burrito
Some piece of the Appalachian Trail only my brother can tell, as a New Yorker I saw brief subtle movements
Preferred to walk ahead of them and their, I thought, romance
As a sprout all the way to Florida
The grand Tetons, Albuquerque, Rome
The hijacked night aboard a merchant ship to Greece
I wanted more than anything a sip of wine
But dared not ask.
We were humbled by dogs in poverty.
I often lost my composure, direction
I find leaves still in my hair.