Walking with the Beloved

After Trebbe's Endless Mountains Quest, I ask myself, what does it feel like to walk into New York the way I would want to walk into the Beloved's arms? The city is repulsive after being in the marshland and blueberry filled meadows of Pennsylvania.

But don't run away from this city, this place. Be here the way I was in the woods. Feel it. Stop resisting it. Feel it. Head a total mess-- hot. Armpits suffocated, breathing shallow, tired behind the eyes- a cloud, my eyes try to push through-- my heart tries to push through. I am here-- these streets, this city, all the sound and sex of it. I want to devour everything , to own everything, to to chew on the air i pull through my nostrils like a cat or a bull, ready to charge and pounce on something smaller than it. Is this city so much larger than me? It is only buildings and streets and bill boards overwhelming-- All the people slanted this way and that, sitting and sipping and shouting and frowning seem so big mixed in together with so many sounds of sirens. But take them one by one. Sift them each from the city arcing and cawing around them, and they are just me, moving, looking through wonder and anxiety-- what do these streets these hundreds of streaking faces have in store for me? Spin them up with a smile, twirl them around with a shit eating grin-- look in wonder at the bubbling streets- they all become children again, that coffee shop is the stream they dangle their bare feet in, hoping for someone to play. And the games are all in busy hearts, waiting waiting waiting, and the streets are waiting, the great planes are waiting for your face, the great streets are waiting for your Fred Astaire roulette, their horns solitary and full of loneliness wait for your ears and the clitter clattering sky is waiting swallowing you up--its the city, and its going to pull something out of you or you're going to pull something out of it and it must be this way-- you must destroy each other, if you hold on to who you were, it can only eat away at you, but if you let go, let every smile fly without the necessity of commerce, let your heart out the door to all those passing strangers, paint the walls with your most startling desires, let this churning consume you and a new spirit raises itself out of the waddle not to be seen or heard but to sing out, to call out across the Hudson to places lost in America-- I am. Let me be a part of this great myth!