Landing in New York I smelled the breeze

of the jet-way. I inhaled it as home. Home.

The guy at immigration was all Please

and thank you, Where you been–Awesome.

But Hey, you are home, he said,  enjoy it.

I prowled for gifts, flew out toward Syracuse,

to a wife whose face once beautiful was ripped

with the agony of my arrival. How are you?

And you, I said. It must be cold. It is she said.

In Ithaca she poured gin, and said her lover’s name,

and how sometimes in the hard white weather dead

love stays dead, how then you have to find the same

thing you killed in another, whose unrepentant heart

follows yours on a mapless trail from finish to start.