Suburbia Grand

Suburbia Grand


“Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore
Only among the crowd and under roofs
That our frail hands have raised?”

- William Cullen Bryant, from “A Forest Hymn”

"It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way."

- Christopher Morley, from “The Haunted Bookshop”

I

So, here we are in America,
full of stuff.
This poem will be suburban, pedestrian,
you name it.
This poem will have a lot to do
with television.
We are long past realizing
the author will never die.
We won’t let him, but
we’d like to.
So – we keep him on life-support.
Some of us, like lampreys
grasp the conduits of nature
but perhaps we are just
redistributing our own nature.
Isn’t that deep? Let’s discuss it -
over dinner.
Dinners over and we forget to discuss it.
We’re too full to talk.
Let’s just rest a while,
let’s watch some T.V.

I’m trying to write this poem for the rest of us.
You sure as hell won’t.
Who writes poetry anymore?
We read poetry now.
Maybe, if you’re lucky,
or trying
to get lucky.
Who writes in this sad-bastard
with sarcastic apathy
tone of voice
anymore?


II

what do you do
when you were raised so far from livestock
that you cannot remember blood or milk?
do you cower at the stench of birth,
or can you learn to be born again
in the other America?
I am holding out hope that I was wrong,
that the vindication of my generation fast approaches,
and we will be set free of all machinery.
I am trying to write the great American poem,
but not from what I’ve sensed –
from the other America.

I’ve lost sleep, waiting
for the rebirth of wonder not in new, wonderful things
but a passionate scenic view
coming up on our right.
when I look over the cliff I see the water tower,
and the closed down mill.
I see a hundred stories I can never write.

so, I wait, and wonder –
will it all shift so heavy?
am I living in the other America?

III

this uneasy and tired night,
settled firmly into the ground
like interlocking parts
of a whole portrait.

the story of our lives
displayed monochromatically.
the lights of every living room
abolish the stars.

the darkness is like winter,
thin and built of wires, like
saying hello to your uncle
at a funeral

alone in every bedroom
we wait impatient for
our due diligence to
pay off in the long run

every back to a television set
we are bound together in
our communal ignorance of
the soft blue-green light emitted.

this year we have begun to read
all the books we want to have read
not for us, but for how they look
creased and annotated on our shelves

we have impeccable taste in music
it’s cultivation, a scar
here between the rolling hills
all we have is depth.

Writing our poems after midnight,
smoking cigarettes like in our dreams.
we are the poets of suburbia –
we’ve learned to ignore the TV.

IV

Directions Distance
Total Est. Time: 35 minutes Total Est. Distance: 22.28 miles
1: Start out going SOUTHEAST on KENMARE ST toward BOWERY. <0.1 miles
2: KENMARE ST becomes DELANCEY ST. 0.4 miles
3: Turn SLIGHT LEFT onto WILLIAMSBURG BRIDGE. 1.9 miles
4: Take I-278 E / BROOKLYN QUEENS EXPY. 1.9 miles
5: Take the I-495 / L I EXPWY exit- EXIT 35- toward MIDTOWN TUN. 0.1 miles
6: Merge onto I-495 E via EXIT 35E toward EASTERN LONG IS. 15.5 miles
7: Take EXIT 37 toward WILLIS AVE / ROSLYN / MINEOLA. 0.1 miles
8: Stay STRAIGHT to go onto POWERHOUSE RD. 0.5 miles
9: Turn LEFT onto ROSLYN RD. 0.6 miles
10: Turn RIGHT onto HARBOR HILL RD. 0.5 miles
11: Turn LEFT onto CHESTNUT DR. 0.2 miles
12: End at Chestnut Dr
Roslyn, NY 11576-2338, US
Total Est. Time: 35 minutes
Total Est. Distance: 22.28 miles

V

The car glides through
scenery that is only an anagram of
scenery from five, ten, two hundred miles behind.

I see my reflection in the constant brown rocks on the roadside
in their blue-grey icicles
I see:
the ever-present yearn downwards,
an eternity of failure.

Each road sign that waxes and wanes is a reminder
a mirror image of all other testaments to highway safety
another reminder of the vast rolling sameness of New England.

Like a bullet, our journey has no plot arc,
we are only the straight line, dashed, from point A to point B.

I roll down the window/, -

The
world
is
colors
now,



and on the wind comes molecules of dust and scents rural and right,
the smokes from chimney tops are a hundred rude exclamation marks to my
discovery of America.
I am the new Christopher Columbus, sailed the ocean blue-
me big man now in history books.

Instantaneously I am the world’s foremost expert on apple pie.
narrating this tour with fireworks of gesticulation,
peals of sound over the roar of the wind in through the
window.

I have inborn knowledge now awakened of the secret lives of trees
from inception to destruction
I want to pull over and commute my sentence in favor of
a thick-booted and face burning run through the forest so much nearer now.

VI

Roslyn, NY

Some things you should know:
1. Population: 2,750
2. Median Resident Age: 43.9 yrs
3. Estimated Mean Household Income in 2005: $80,700
4. Races in Roslyn:
* White Non-Hispanic (83.3%)
* Hispanic (6.3%)
* Chinese (2.6%)
* Two or more races (2.6%)
* Black (2.3%)
* Other race (2.0%)
* Asian Indian (1.6%)
* Korean (1.3%)

VII

This now-ended delirium
a vast gash across America
the defeat of boundaries.
Suffocated in black Indiana heat
begin again to dream your night away
and see if you can breathe at all
without a lovable mystery to hold.

Red car,
the lightning bolt of perfect wisdom that cuts through the void
marks the history of this movement incrementally
with no end in sigh beyond the horizon
which even in sweaty earnest we cannot conquer.

at night, as if a light through the webbing of your fingers,
we see the red and white veins of American are glowing with the comings and
goings hither and yon beneath the watchful eye of the moon.

worried about America,
we are worried about ourselves.







VIII

I have seen a vision mighty, made me shake
and I kid you not friend, you would shiver to
stand in its presence is to know who you are
and are not, and what you are built of inside.

There is no place to hide when it comes up
screaming up your spine and explodes upon
the insides of your eye-lids, no blanket built
yet strong enough to hide beneath successfully

standing foot frozen and frightened I (you)
found no comfort in mankind’s history in fact
it was detrimental to the whole experience but
also it was the whole experience, somehow.

IX

Dearest mother, American night,
I am deathly afraid:
of losing myself in the folds of your bosom.
Driving so far form the lights of men
that there is no reference left for
direction and in all the blackness
I am forever in some residential community.

It's Science.

Confound my attempt to flat-out disregard science and parallel
your every move with one more cleverly staged and my own.

Deny my spiritual advice and risk disintegration of emotion
but reflect on the positive results of total mechanical integration.

Circumspect and sophistic but clearly some kind of valiant push
towards the geography of your slumber, unassailable and down.

An Old Favorite

Monument

Uncle Tom’s cabin is the Rosenberg’s vacation home,
Packed with people until the walls, the whole thing, swells like a waterbed.
Flubbing on the otherwise paperish landscape,
The landscape that rustles slightly in the wind and has no depth to the intrepid eraser.
Gandhi’s rags were burned with the trash,
Lincoln’s last shaving razor was launched by his houseboy into the wastebasket,
A post-mortem precursor to the American Basketball Association.

Another one from the Archives

He walks lines narrow waiting ledge
Fear the great white a-coming in wind.

The night time is like plum pudding and
When he tries to tell her that he wants to see other people
His mouth gets clogged and he only
Tells her he wants to see.

Above them the fireworks are a Bruce Springsteen song
Twice repeated from the horizon
The ex navy-men sit in folding chairs with Schlitz
And they quote the tide as it comes and,
Like their libido, recedes.

Here on the shore he brought her
Here he walked out on the pier
Here he was ringing a dinner bell out across empty fields

A newer poem about an older friend

all the sweaters and tea cups in new england couldn’t remind me enough of you
to break my heart all over again just for the fun of it
and try and close my eyes and tighten my face
to forget that you ever breathed
right next to my face
when the frost
was on the
window.

driving
east on 495
with the top down
and the radio way, way up
winding our way to your house
far from the town we grew up in
and learned what it meant to love and
forgot everything we ever knew about hearts.
all the sweaters and tea cups in new england couldn’t remind me enough of you.

God.

I have seen a vision mighty, made me shake
and I kid you not friend, you would shiver to
stand in its presence is to know who you are
and are not, and what you are built of inside.

There is no place to hide when it comes up
screaming up your spine and explodes upon
the insides of your eye-lids, no blanket built
yet strong enough to hide beneath successfully

standing foot frozen and frightened I (you)
found no comfort in mankind’s history in fact
it was detrimental to the whole experience but
also it was the whole experience, somehow.

Falling

From out of the sky, falling there came a piece of something
that was not of this our world, neither mine nor yours besides.

We cautiously approached the smoking crater like two gazelles
and twitching with alarm and sweating we inched our necks out.

What we saw is not to be said but when we left we left slowly
ambling towards the edge of the clearing, no longer afraid.

No Title Yet

I don’t suppose I can write
a love poem well enough
yet to turn the tide from
receding to approaching.
Still I try to stop and can’t.

Wanting to write a poem
is not the same as writing
a poem, which is different
still from reaching you.
There are lines between.

I put on Dylan’s record,
“New Morning” now and
then and when he sings I
wish I had a phonograph
built into my throat.

Opening my mouth you
would hear and know how
I felt, and you might feel
the same way, when the
drums came in you’d know.

Poems of Days

Saturday

On Saturday morning, feeling slack
a loose arrangement of limbs
suspended in this borrowed bed.
In defiance of the sun’s ascent
seek out the shady corner of the porch
to sit awhile and read a book.
Eat a bite and make small talk
before you return to your bungalow
to fetch your typewriter out of your case
and try to retrace steps between
a temporary desk and a temporary pillow.
I wonder will today be
the day I write a fine poem
and remember the words of my teacher
about forgetting.
In an all pink room with zebra rug,
morning comes,
a welcome rotation
from the dark.