Portside

Once I took a midnight Greyhound out of Albuquerque
in winter. I don't have to tell you that trouble found my house.

Dismay and disquiet filed in with me, and took a seat.

When we pulled into Gallup, the bars were shut tight,
the bus station shone in a harsh white light, and

Security was busy kicking everyone out. Men poured through
glass doors, America, doors a guard held open;

they must have been Navajo, those men filled with spirits,
and some slung their arms across the shoulders of ruin,

and some clung to the waist of gorgeous thirst.

They poured into night on unsteady feet; not one
had a ticket to get on the bus. They were cast out.

Our idling engine never stopped roaring.

Tell me, who is lost?

That night a young man turns and tries to re-enter, and he's blocked,
the guard is larger. He tries again, and is blocked.

Slender shoulders and long black hair, only a boy, after all,
barely old enough to be drafted.

Nowhere to go. Home, always a metaphor.

And more than his face falls. We see a shape that's not there--
his plural self dividing:

It must be his soul fallen to the pavement.

America, how young I was to believe you were written
in a luminous language, words that could stand or fly, I thought,

emblazoned on air, so gallantly streaming.

He's sobbing now in an old man's arms--can his soul get back up?
A wet light from the stars gathers on their faces;

the old man looks like he might be singing.

Outside, the thermometer's red line drops
to seventeen, inside, fetid air and heat.

The Greyhound pulls out of the station and we become
the sound of its engine, and darkness.

And he's left behind listening to the voice in his ear, that boy
who could barely stay in his own body,

trying not to want so much to die.

And the elder holds him up with a song from cracked lips.
Tell me, who is lost?

I'm an old woman now, and can say this:
Look to your declarations, America.

Do you know how many times you've lied? How many times
have your words died, inside a song, outside a locked door,

in the head of any one of your ten thousand flag-waving thugs?

Or is it numberless, and happens in solitude? One by one and singly,
America, you keep dying over and over inside us, and

we keep trying, each alone, to bring you back.
 

Marsha de la O is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently Creature. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Slowdown, and many other journals.