These beautifully grown men. These hungerers. <br />Look at them looking! <br />They're overdrawn on all accounts but hope <br />& they've missed <br />(for the hundredth time) the express <br />to the city of dreams <br />& settled, sighing, for a desperate local; <br />so who's to blame them <br />if they swim through swimming pools of twelve- <br />year-old scotch, or fall <br />in love with widows (other than their wives) <br />who suddenly can't ride <br />in elevators? In that suburb of elms <br />& crabgrass (to which <br />the angel banished them) nothing is more real <br />than last night's empties. <br /> <br />So if they pack up, stuff their vitals <br />in a two-suiter, <br />& (with passports bluer than their eyes) <br />pose as barons <br />in Kitzbuhel, or poets in Portofino, <br />something in us sails <br />off with them (dreaming of bacon-lettuce- <br />and-tomato sandwiches). <br />Oh, all the exiles of the twenties knew <br />that America <br />was discovered this way: desperate men, <br />wearing nostalgia <br />like a hangover, sailed out, sailed out <br />in search of passports, <br />eyes, an ancient kingdom, beyond the absurd <br />suburbs of the heart.<br /><br />Erica Jong<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/cheever-s-people/
