Moving toward Flagstaff I’m out
On the highway I’m hitching
And at night too, when the blurring
Lights hunt me down
I think about you looming
So big and imponderable
LIke a giant hulk
Dave looks up from the dining room table
Where he is doing something on the computer
He has that serious look that slow imponderable gaze and says
I’m looking up Flagstaff Arizona
Why don’t we go there and get out of this damn snow
Let’s go babe let’s go clear across tomorrow
All the way to Flagstaff Arizona
I see you America
I see you when Rozi
from Albania appears
Wrapped in your flag and singing
Oh Holy Nigh at the Walnut st cafe
or when Etheridge ambles in
from his corner on 4th and Martindale
and says no black man
can ever be a citizen can ever be president
so what the fuck, and I see you america
in my swamp yankee Dad
Who believed that any one could do any thing
aka any white man
if he worked hard enough no problem no prison
and I hear you when Woody Guthrie
Sings home the deportees and I hear you
On Sunday when the Somali women
Chant up a righteous storm in the storefront church
Right next to the Flag Pharmacy run by Russians
and now I am stuck in the Milwaukee Airport and it’s snowing
It’s been snowing all night and there’s a second hand book store
Here in the airport I’m happy
And now I am in Allston at a party of sex workers
All women and one Cuban pimp in wingtip shoes
and they’re scooping white powder up from a candy bowl
I’m leaving and Maria is crying her mascara is smearing
And I am right on time
waiting like Ferlinghetti
for a rebirth of wonder will I stay
Or go far away
All night it is snowing it keeps on
Snowing it will snow forever
I look up to my highest window
And I see you america
Tattered but still flying
I look up and look out my high window
And outside I see you waving America you bitch
Tattered and raggedy and lovely still waving