i was nineteen & the way one does when the pockets are empty 
living living living with that mindset of i’ll go anywhere a pretty dollar 
     takes me 
whatever rainwashed city or windlashed city or concrete jungle 
but a new city where the faces are more beautiful than the last 
& there’ll be warehouses needing extra hands or a café or a bar 
or one of those gorgeous garden restaurants i read about in catalogs 
didn’t matter really i had already worked everywhere at everything 
from a gas station attendant in a calm suburb outside Portland, home, 
to putting pins in baseball bats in a factory where the
drum of the machinery rhymed with the drum of a heart, steady steady, 
& spent the longest month of my life in a food processing center 
i had to wake before the sun upped to get to on time;– 
with Jose, Miko, Chuy, those work horses, emptying great metal bins 
of potatoes and chopped celery and onion into a mixing apparatus on whose 
opposite end popped out neatly packaged potato salad for the local 
     grocer;– 
then get off when the sun downed, that way i spent summer 
under footlights and stars: well it happened to be this time Manhattan 
was a bright focal point with its torches and electric advertisements 
i could rally to all the way from Atlanta where i had been posted, 
& said hell with it, bought the $70 ticket for a greyhound, all i had, 
nineteen, & young & dumb & broke, we used to joke around, 
but with my heart spinning for a place i had heard someone say 
where it feels like going through a movie scene wherever you step foot.
i hiked up the stairs and into the greyhound leaving behind 
the insipidly sweet Georgia air for the stale polypropylene 
of the cheap carpeted seats, the smell of which stuck to my pants and’s 
     still there, 
then went off like this into the night going north in the left-most lane. 
somewhere along the way i dozed off and when my eyes fluttered 
it was a bright Virginia morning pouring from the windows and there was 
     this 
fellow by me who i took one look at and knew he wore his heart on his 
     sleeve: 
Pierre, or something like that, & obedient at his feet a blue-nosed dog;–
they were from Canada, he said rolling his cigarette as the bus 
bounced us along a country road; were at the end of a backpacking trip 
he planned poorly in Montreal last year but that had taken them 
from one coast of the U.S. to the other like it was intended.
we talked this way getting to know ourselves how only strangers can 
& he even let me take drags of his cigarette at a rest stop in god knows 
      where, 
until in New York the bus rattled to a stop and we emptied out 
into the avenue where it had begun to snow, saying our farewells & 
sending little puffs of breath up where they collapsed a second later. 
Pierre turned and with an oiled stride went off with the dog behind him 
     wagging 
its tail. i hadn’t planned this far ahead and would need to find 
a spot for the night but wanted to stroll at random a while admiring 
the gravity with which everything revolved in the city, so one foot 
followed the other and it was crazy because i’d never been there and felt 
     vaguely
i’d been there in the mild onset of nostalgia, for the heavy snowfall, 
     for the 
avenues beaded with light, for the eyes smiling between scarves & caps,
& i’m going there all the time to this day