PENNSYLVANIA

The only place I’ve gone, since November 2018, is Pennsylvania. I came here to run an ultramarathon a few Octobers ago, and now I’m here for a poetry reading. It’s not like I never get out, though— for instance, next October, I’m slated to attend a writing retreat… in Pennsylvania.

It seems I’m supposed to be learning something from PA, but so far all I’ve got is that Hampton Inn coffee is broken. I don’t think that’s going to cut it for whatever capricious gods have decided to groundhog-day me through this nearly-northeastern farm-land haven speckled with old stone homes and Hampton Inns. I think to get out of the loop, I’ll have to come away with something more substantive.

I saw a Bald Eagle soaring over the highway on the trip down, so maybe I can learn something about freedom, or scavenging— you know, the American ways.

Or this: I gave the best-attended poetry reading I’ve ever given, in an actual auditorium, with actual people there whom I did not know and was not bribing to be there, so maybe I’m to learn about enough-ness. Maybe I am to see what will suffice, what is sufficient to have done, locating the point at which we can say, “my, lookie here, I have done this thing! There is gladness to be had of it, and one can even imagine a certain contentedness, if one dares to slow down, even stay in one place, and wonder at it”— you know, the not-American way.

Every person I met yesterday was kind, curious, and open. It’s possible that it’s time I revise the lazy and fearful sense that “people are generally awful” to allow for the (heartbreaking?) possibility that