Cheever's People Poem by Erica Jong

These beautifully grown men. These hungerers.
Look at them looking!
They're overdrawn on all accounts but hope
& they've missed
(for the hundredth time) the express
to the city of dreams
& settled, sighing, for a desperate local;
so who's to blame them
if they swim through swimming pools of twelve-
year-old scotch, or fall
in love with widows (other than their wives)
who suddenly can't ride
in elevators? In that suburb of elms
& crabgrass (to which
the angel banished them) nothing is more real
than last night's empties.

So if they pack up, stuff their vitals
in a two-suiter,
& (with passports bluer than their eyes)
pose as barons
in Kitzbuhel, or poets in Portofino,
something in us sails
off with them (dreaming of bacon-lettuce-
and-tomato sandwiches).
Oh, all the exiles of the twenties knew
that America
was discovered this way: desperate men,
wearing nostalgia
like a hangover, sailed out, sailed out
in search of passports,
eyes, an ancient kingdom, beyond the absurd
suburbs of the heart.