H. Writes out the Sadness in his Heart

After twelve years, you’d think the long stretches
of black birch and dogwood I’ve endured
on my drives back East would’ve painted me
the way they inhabit the long Pennsylvania winter.

If it was all a dream of cute, mid-atlantic odalisques
and deep chasms holding deeper rivers
then I am quite satisfied. For in the presence
of such bodies I was humbled.

Driving one morning I saw in the distance
a semi-tractor flinch on the ice of I-81--
I was on my way to Harrisburg to catch a train
and the snow had been falling all morning.

Bowie was singing s on my blue SUV’s CD player--
“The Bewley Brothers,” real cool dreamers so turned on
he’d made a sad song about their mishaps.

So when the disk started skipping

I thought about the time I slipped
on my slick wooden porch, tearing my left knee apart.
This is all the suffering I abide by--I’ve become
a fool for the cold morning that finds me shivering.

Somehow, I wish you were here with me
cascading down the turnpike, stoned
on the last tid-bits of a Beatles song that
has wrapped me up & into the invisible highway

beyond my hood ornament, shining on the Western horizon
like one of Belle Starr’s tits. Listen: the deal is this--
my sister sent me a telescope for Christmas
and I intend to visit each planet again.