Watching a Movie In Bed In New York

Watching a movie in bed in New York,
I think I recognize the green soy fields of Ohio.
My eyes, trained one year
in the angular
graphite of street and skyscraper,
are struck by the wild green.

I look past the faces of the farmers,
the deep wells of fear in their eyes,
wanting only to see the grass and oak,
the green I can hardly believe,
the smooth yellow fields,
the occasional patches of shady trees,
the long gray roads and heavy blue skies.

I want to lie down in those fields,
I want to drive those gray roads.
The wide green seems a good bed
but there the garter snake lies.

Route 33

Route 33 is the most beautiful road.
It used to go to my girlfriend's house.
In the winter, when the Scioto was frozen,
driving alongside
the wide, white river
to the soft light coming
through the windshield
there was a Heaven above
and below.
There was a Heaven
in all directions.

Sad Ohio Stars

Sad Ohio stars smudged across the windshield,
frozen tracks caught in the snow.
Silence of purple winter nights
looked at through drowsy headlights
struggling to keep awake.

We turned into adults
in drunken nights lost on High St.
to the tune of the garbage flowers
sprung from guitar strings,
rising with the foam of PBR cans
in warm bars full of song.
The girls pointed cameras at each other and clicked
as smoke ascended from the ends of their forked fingers
and the bands sang for nights
when small glories were won
in each other's arms.
Bringing the bars to a close,
we trekked home across the grimy snow,
unfucked, lugging six packs
with arms empty of women.

One night, we watched from the bed
of my brother’s pick up as the fire of stars
leapt across the sky,
out of nowhere
back into nowhere,
too timid even to wish on them.
I was trying to figure out
what the Greeks were up to,
conjuring brawny Gods from
three puny dots connected by a line
drawn with a finger in a child’s eyes.

The stars meant nothing to me,
all of them.
I did not know who they were.
We were lost to each other’s stares
a hundred roads ago.

In Central Ohio it’s the garbage that’s beautiful.
The empty cardboard beer cases
turning into crowns, the hardwood floors
stuck to your shoes on Sunday morning.
Shit makes the flowers grow
from this landscape of boredom,
where the cows stand in one place all their lives,
and the corn waits obediently between strip malls
and wonderful green mountains beyond the gray sunset
rubbed out like a mistake with a Staedtler eraser.

The casket skies of old Ohio,
one year from me,
moving, changing, shifting,
falling harder into the gray.

My family came over the hills of Chillicothe,
out of the huge mists of Nogytuck and Pity-me,
the gunsmoke of Israel Putnam and a crooked fork
thrown to the bottom of the Scioto River.
We had reasons to be lonely.
We had reasons to leave home.
We had nothing and no one
but each other,
the same people we'd always had.

Traveling,
I will always be digging
at my heart in Ohio's
frozen dirt.

Go have a youth, I remind myself,
but I never really knew how
to be young and
the saddest city is the one
you grow up in,
the one
you never get out of.

The Pick Up Artists; or, Narcissistic Kunstlerroman

I had an optimistic number of condoms in my wallet

when we set off looking for women at The Met.

Shawn had showed me Youtube videos of these men,

Pick-Up Artists, who broke the social hems

we had devoutly set against ourselves.

They seduced women in three gestures.

They didn’t introduce themselves

or talk about what they did for a living.

They took the ladies' hands, swept them up, kissed them.

The women seemed to be thrilled by it,

joy exploding from their faces

in inappropriate, unregulated ways.

We had both tried to be writers.

We read all the books Harold Bloom said need to be read.

It didn't get us laid.

We agreed that art was something of a ploy,

a roundabout way to get the attention of women.

Did the world need another narcissistic kunstlerroman?

Was it proper to spend your youth alone

at a desk in a room re-envisioning your life

so it all came out in your favor?

Shawn said writers were the ultimate chodes.

Why not charge directly into life instead?

Living was the new art.

Everything is available to us

if we conquer our self-imposed neurosis,

our guilt, and take it.

We were loud and brash on the subway uptown,

I told Shawn I had a whole bandolier of condoms,

I was going on a Fuck Spree.

He laughed painfully.

When we got off the train

we found that The Met was not the place

for young ladies on a Friday afternoon.

The women were too old or too young:

pushing strollers or riding in them.

We were stuck looking at art instead.

In the Roman gallery, the threatening dicks

of the statues had been snapped off

by the criticism of twenty centuries

(Time: the harshest critic!).

The Renaissance revealed the most intimate moments of women:

Two men watching a mother pinch her breast

to the eager mouth of a babe,

the nipple near a candleflame

framed in the center of a crisp oil painting.

(To the baby, the nipple is the center of life.

To us, it had been relocated a foot or so below.)

Shawn said the museum gave him Old Man Energy.

He said Raphael was into Fatties.

We came to the room where Degas was

inventing the confidential girls of our modern age.

Girls had never been orange before his

with the ibis' perched on their shoulders

burning into the sunset like blush.

Degas' brushes sang:

Dance across the practice rooms,

you afternoon ladies,

to the twinkling ghost

of the player piano.

Dance taunting in wilted tutus, you spirits,

hair strapped in obedient buns,

deadly eyes locked on polaroid cameras.

Degas eavesdropping on white skin,

a bare shoulder, a toe lifting a body

into air.

Degas' brushes sang:

Dance against the intentions of boys,

you orange ladies,

you are powder blasts of skin

dissolving into the air,

hiding all around us

in rows of scissored legs!

Degas brushes sang:

Women are life

and birth rebellion!

Shawn asked me if I was ready to go yet.

He said he was sorry he ruined my afternoon.

He said going to the museum was a horrible idea.

Every woman that came near made us silent.

We apologized to each other for continuing to be

our failed little selves.

On the subway there was a pretty girl sitting alone.

Shawn’s posture changed.

Something took over that was not words.

He sat next to her.

I watched their reflection in the glass

as they had a pleasant conversation.

It seemed like a miracle.

I had nothing to do.

I stood there, like people do on the train,

in suspended animation,

not quite remembering how to dream

and doing it with as little offense as possible.

Fragment

Some are puddles
some are ponds
some are oceans deep

But it's in your eyes
I find fathoms
unlimited steep

I Dream of a Dream of You

I dream of a dream of you.
I can't wait for sleep, where I reach
to hold you as I reach into a stream
to touch the sun.

I dream of a dream of you,
where each moment you move and smile
from an imagination not my own
like a flower unscrolled by water.

I dream of a dream of you
as I lie down on tomorrow's sky
across 30,000 miles of rock
and a light year of space.

I dream of a dream of you
where today is yesterday and tomorrow.
I no longer look for yesterday's sun
to bring past skies over my head.

I dream of a dream of you
predicting how tomorrow's sky will cause
us to see it, what clouds and colors
will be imagined by the chemicals of the horizon.

I dream of a dream of you.
You know how you are a fire for me.
I turn out the light and close my eyes
and look for you again in the dark.

She Dreams the Road I'm Walking Down

Some men are born with no destiny,
They come and go without a sound.
I didn't choose what life would be,
She dreams the road I'm walking down.

My feet are in the stars, she said,
The journey lies here on the ground.
I didn't go, but I was led.
She dreams the road I'm walking down.

Which eyes were real and which were fake?
I stare into a great unknown.
The moon is drowning in the lake.
She dreams the road I'm walking down.

We came to the X where the roads are crossed.
I stepped off from the way she'd found.
I don't know how long I've been lost.
She dreams the road I'm walking down.

I'm too far gone, I can't turn back,
I've picked up the bottle, I can't put it down.
My legs are strong but my heart is slack.
She dreams the road I'm walking down.

I sit and chew a sandwich crust.
They clink and cheers and have a round.
They do what they want, I do what I must.
She dreams the road I'm walking down.

I watch lovers passing by,
Always here just hanging around.
The days dissolve one at a time.
She dreams the road I'm walking down.

The birds have carried south her song,
The leafy notes of gold and brown.
I will not say that I was wrong.
She dreams the road I'm walking down.