The Breath of New Jersey

The Breath of New Jersey

I still know the breath of New Jersey,
the tin-pan howl of Conrail
freights that slash the air
with warning strobes
like machetes at the stalks
of dark, then burst
onto the Madison Street grade,
each locomotive
larger than the Foodtown
and blacker than a spade
in ink-lets of dust.

Night sinks quickly in New Jersey,
atop the wailing tractor-trailers
swimming Turnpike, spastic,
chilled to the frame, fighting up-stream
like salmon to spawn their loads
in Newark, Hoboken, and Hackensack,
stone cities gone ash in fields of weed
that crust their factories
like barnacles on a blue whale's snout.
Look to the rivers of pitch
for the detritus we spit out!

In New Jersey the leaves all wear
a tired film of smoke,
while new homes are jammed
on back lawns and front lawns
and side lawns of lots
which were drawn for one original house.
The acorns flock like marbles
to curb stone gutters where dog turds
cure, and cigarette butts turn to rust,
while grayish rains sizzle clouds
and storm whistles the rooftops,

"This is New Jersey, leave it alone,
leave us! You must!"
On my ears I still sense
the flush of the brook
snake wash around the pines, where geese
chase field mice that climb
periwinkle to the banks.
And the wind, the wind, the hollow wind,
that crone, that harbor breath
of voice that billows the panes
and knocks storm windows to rattle

New Jersey's children's dreams
of when the snow grows thick and Bakelite
kitchen radios screech, "1010 WINS News,
the following schools will be closed..."
and old men tremble,
scrape powder from their windshields,
drop salt to their drives.
By afternoon the white sheet of the lawn's
gone grey, and the children don't see,
and their mothers won't see,
and their fathers can't see
that there is death in New Jersey,
where the Raritan, the Overpeck, and the
Passiac
are her veins opened up,
left scabbed, mired and stained,

where the sanitation trucks gnaw
their trash each Thursday before dawn,
then heave into Meadowlands' ponds.
I hear the crack
snap as a neighbor touches match
to his piled leaves, and somehow
with the rush of that smoke,
the ache of that train,
and the hymn of that wind,
it's hard to forget a place like that.