LETTER TO MANHATTAN

--for Joe Donahue

Friend, I never thought I'd see you
bred to that bumptious city as once
you were to the faded milltown

where you know "the pet names of the dead."
Remember the jittery slant
of your arrival? How I relished

your letters: the hounds of Central Park,
you said, would smell your newness
and circle in. Your postcards claimed

the city was leviathan
and would be tamed. They didn't say
it could be loved. Cockroaches

you knew quoted Gregor Samsa
as you slapped them senseless.
Your Pakistani roommate hurled

ashtrays and cookware to protest
his girlfriend and the encroaching Jews.
Now, glare of ice on the Hudson,

oil smoke moiling from a furnace,
even a defaced subway poster
are your Yale College and your Harvard.

Now your "speech, most subtle of beasts,"
watches over those black rivers
I shudder to cross. Whitman's City

of War, City of Orgies, City
"of hurried and glittering tides"--
was always Wittgenstein's city

as language. A dream syntax. Rope
tied to itself. If you dream now
of dog-barking backyards, green

air any moron could breathe
all his life without second thoughts--
you don't say. Towns of our childhood

both had rivers foul enough to float
a Checker cab--it's not
purity we find in the sticks,

not beauty, "books in the running brooks"
of Arden. Imagine, though,
my life: crickets all night, cattle

lowing two fields away, Paris
Mountain presiding over all.
The steady mine mine of lawnmowers,

everything flattened, separate,
owned, even the sloping hayfield
my eye walks each dusk. Cities

no more or less orderly:
the difference is space more than
quiet, more than color or smell.

The difference is all talk.
"There is now your insular city,"
said Melville, "belted round by wharves

as Indian isles by coral reefs--
commerce surrounds it with her surf."
Good talk is also commerce,

ebb and flow, leaving the pylons
glistening, ringed with barnacles,
the green and gray scruff of each day.

True, I do cherish stories of
your city's imperial swagger:
how window decals in the Bronx

paper over those gutted hulks
with pure imagination: a
motorist sees curtains, houseplants

and, I imagine, catches sight
of phantom families dining
on the bounty that is the mind.

Even Mussolini couldn't
top that--who to impress Hitler
faced a mile of railway track with

phony buildings from whose stage-windows
thousands of patriots waved on
the Axis. So the glory of

a city is it's portable,
small as a book, a radio,
an idea afloat on the

airwaves of time. Could the country
survive in the city without
turning freakish and sad, like the

polar bears in Central Park Zoo?
I don't say reading is living,
not exactly. But don't we who

live so much in open spaces
have more room to fill with alien
notions? A common delusion,

that there is green grass on either
side of the fence. As Horace wrote
to the caretaker of his farm:

"let's see which hired hand weeds better:
you when clearing the thorns from the land,
or I when clearing my mind." And:

"the mind is to blame. It has to
live with itself, wherever it is."
I shouldn't measure what I don't know,

though I'm sure a mockingbird could
rival any urban nocturne,
garbage lids and multilingual

cursing. I'd measure just the pulse
that can't be measured, for which all words
seem reductive, cheap: calm, ease, peace.

For me it's a small town. For you
I may dwell in the seventh circle
of tedium. Even so, you don't

look for muskrats down a woodchuck hole,
even if you saw one there. Once
I had a dog, who as a puppy

chased a rabbit underneath our
tool shed. Then for seven years snuffed
under those boards for the rabbit

of his imagination, which,
since he was an honest dog,
he naturally never found.

My two years in a minor city
fevered me--I still sniff at
what I learned there, oh dazzling

litter of life. I think of the park
where, winter evenings, we slid
across pond ice pitted with trash,

shielding our eyes at the center
to see, straight up, a few dim stars.
Often I think of returning

and the smell of it--exhaust fans
and bus fumes--defeats me. An early memory
I can't escape: losing track

of my father on a sidewalk
in Albany, New York. I looked up
to grasp his hand, and the man who

had been my father now became
some kindly, puzzled stranger with
similar pants. For me a city

sings perpetual loss, and
the father I run to won't live
there. Last summer, after weeks

on the road, lying in our own bed
at last, I awoke one dawn
into a slug of amnesia:

for a good half minute I looked
about the odd room. What state
was I in? What month of my life?

The plaster on the ceiling loomed
like a medieval map, more faith
than experience, and I hated

to think I would soon follow
its arbitrary cracks. My friend,
what remains? Is homelessness

everyone's dream, slurring nightmare
to daylight? When Lee suggested,
hearing my story, that we paint

home on the ceiling above our bed,
she didn't need to do so,
for I could see it already

in the most jarring of dawns.
We say housekeeping, as if home
were a strenuous claim. It is.