Updike Describes My America

I happened upon a book of John Updike poetry at the Washington Heights library this week and read the whole thing over the course of a couple days. His most recent publication, Americana, explores the themes of travel in the U.S. and Europe, growing old, and American life. These two poems describe my two homes quite accurately. I thank Mr. Updike for artfully commenting on the joys and sorrows of such metropoli.

New York City

The television's just like everywhere --
the news, the so-called comedies. One feels
let down; this is a separate nation, no?
For here one speaks ingles self-consciously,
embarrassed to be speaking it so well
amid the toehold accents and the slurs
of knit-capped beggars whining, "Some loose change?"

This Pandemonium whose sky is like
the unfilled spaces of a crossward puzzle,
whose sheets of windows rise like thirsty thunder
above the glaze of blinding expectation --
this hell holds sacred crevices where lone
lost spirits preen and call their pit a throne.

Phoenix

This grid of green slapped down on desert flats
relieved by bits of gray-red mountain left
like stray chunks of the undeveloped moon
calls five-lane highways streets, mile after mile
through ornate-gated, walled-off wilderness
of Spanish tile and dun ersatz abobe;
the blue-capped Western glut of space permits
some vacant blocks as long as airplane runways.

This wealth of Taco Bells and high-rise glass
will drink the Salt and Gila rivers dry
to form a golf-course universe, a garden
of imaginary blooms, a made mirage
whose web of jogging paths entraps a swarm
of retirees all struggling not to die.