america

you dumb bastard, I’m in love with you again—and in January, no small feat. But they’ve been calling thirty degrees a heat wave and in the morning my driving hands don't cry for mittens. I was really mad at you too, America—all fall I’d been spiraling through the dark and empty rooms of the mind, orange pill bottles rattling in a bedside drawer like bones, still wet. But then it was January and my lungs burned from new runs, and I sat through the two-hour dance rehearsal for Flint City Theater’s Romeo and Juliet—boy, America, the thirty actors and their dumb, beautiful faces, their hands snapping, their too-tall hair—nice touch. And the actor playing Capulet, the older one whose pants flapped at his ankles like sails and the painstaking, almost delicate way he recorded the steps in a tiny red notebook, how old and gray he was next to the beautiful young—stroke of genius, America. Any other day I’d see him at a carwash and think: Loser, creep. But that night I loved him.

Of course you know that afterward I talked to a Greek cook about the nuances of the Michigan coney, its dry meat sauce, the shaky way we managed to communicate a mutual distrust of kidney beans, and even the waitress smiled. And that later, in the morning, there was a hot shower and after that I sat with a dying dog, one whose tail thumped every time I paused in my petting.

And then I was on a plane, and below me were the burned-out cities of Detroit and Jamestown and Buffalo—homes. America, I still shock at the speed of which you turn from lake to farm and back to lake, your hills laced with ski slopes, the lazy rivers and the way even a snow-covered high school track looks, from the air, exactly like a high school track.

Then below me was our city. New York. I’d never seen it from the air, but everything was as I knew it would be: the great geometry of parks, the silver spires, the docks chewing at the water, the tankers off to sea, the thin lip of beaches and the marshes—all of it pale green and orange in the afternoon light, short winter light. And as the plane banked and dipped, I realize this is city is mine, mine though I haven’t been here in years. Mine because I’m American and dumb and alive. The Hall and Oates Muzak at JFK was another nice touch, and the old man waiting so patiently with yellow flowers, and the two Portuguese children chasing each other’s red Mylar heart balloons, and even the cranky woman in a flu mask camped out under an airline-issued blanket, sprawled across three chairs—America, you idiot, I would have loved you anyway, you’re home, my home. And now Whitman and Ginsberg are waiting to collect me at baggage claim, Terminal 8, and we all take the A train into the city and buy each other hot dogs.