It had taken him long enough but now
He was an American. The years of effort had paid off.
He knew all about the pennant races and the Academy Awards
And was off on a great adventure, which would take him
West of the Mississippi River and cast of the dark unknown,
Where the land yielded moistly to his gentle pressure
And any jerk in a drugstore could grow up to be president,
Then considered a glamorous ambition. He woke up
Hungry and hungover as the bus pulled in.
Half an hour later, they were on the road again,
Everyone singing “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.”
Soon he found himself in the city of his birth, which used to be Chicago
And had now become New York. No wonder it felt different.
The young people had all been replaced by strangers.
Gone were the gangs of his boyhood, the spat blood and desecrated prayer shawls.
There was the time he fought a guy with a knife, protecting his sister:
His moment of glory in an alley off Nagle Avenue,
After which he never again punched anyone out but was himself mugged twice
And burglarized on a third occasion, and when his next door neighbor
Killed herself with pills, it was he who discovered the body.
He had tried to make sense of her on the basis of what he could hear through the walls—
The kind of music she liked, Sixties hard rock, Cream, the Doors—
And what she was wearing and what she was doing the one time she asked him over.
Enough of that. It wasn’t his fault. He looked around him, sober but not for long.
The men on the bar stools with bald spots on the top of their heads
Were high-risk candidates for heart attacks,
Especially if they worked in advertising, being creative with the Coca-Cola account
Before it was snatched away by an upstart West Coast agency with MTV on its brains.
“Advertising once had soul,” the bald guy was saying.
His wife had the glazed look of a wife
Who has heard it before, nursing a glass of Chardonnay on the rocks.