Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

David Lehman’s "Arrival at Kennedy" is a meditation on belonging, memory, and nostalgia, set against the backdrop of a late-night arrival in New York City. The poem juxtaposes the physical return to a place with the emotional and historical weight it carries, blending past and present in a surreal, dreamlike sequence. The opening lines establish a sense of scarcity and frustration—"Reduce the supply while the demand stays constant and the / result is / No taxis for anybody."—a commentary on the chaotic, unpredictable nature of the city. The speaker’s arrival is marked by inconvenience, yet this inconvenience is familiar, reinforcing the city’s identity as his own.

The cab ride itself takes on an almost hallucinatory quality, as the cabbie "lights up a joint & news of Jackie Gleason?s death / comes on the radio." The moment is both absurd and poignant, a collision of the mundane and the iconic. Gleason, a quintessentially New York figure, is being memorialized just as the speaker is reacquainting himself with the city, suggesting a layered return—not just physical but historical and cultural.

Despite recognizing "hardly / any of the streets," the speaker asserts, "This is my city, I know that now," reflecting the paradox of familiarity and alienation that often accompanies homecoming. His inebriation ("I?m three drinks ahead of the rest of the cast") adds to the blurriness of time and space, with the figure of "Eurydice in the rear-view mirror" serving as both a literal passenger and a mythic presence. In Greek mythology, Orpheus loses Eurydice when he looks back; here, she "warns me to focus on the road ahead," reinforcing the tension between nostalgia and forward movement.

The poem seamlessly blends the personal with the collective past. The "old / Neighborhood hardware store" becomes a locus of memory, where "a sailor and his girl kissed / under the awning / And became our parents during World War II." The casual revelation that these figures are the speaker’s parents transforms an ordinary scene into an origin story, where personal history is inextricably linked to the city’s larger narrative. This moment of retrospective romance—"big band music, / Rita Hayworth, / Gray fedoras, and the Third Avenue El"—evokes a lost New York, a cinematic dream of the past.

Yet, the past is always slipping away. The poem closes on a striking image of reckless abandon: "When freedom meant driving a car over a cliff & jumping out / at the last possible moment." This suggests both exhilaration and inevitable destruction, a metaphor for youthful idealism, risk-taking, and the ephemeral nature of time. The contrast between the mythic past and the uncertain present underscores the poem’s central tension—whether one can ever truly return home.

Structurally, the poem’s long, enjambed lines create a continuous, flowing rhythm that mirrors the movement of the cab through the city. The absence of stanza breaks reinforces the sense of an unbroken stream of thought, where past and present blur, memories surface unexpectedly, and the city itself becomes a living, breathing force.

Ultimately, "Arrival at Kennedy" captures the complexity of homecoming, where nostalgia, personal history, and the passage of time intersect. The city is both familiar and unknowable, a place of ghosts and reinvention. The speaker’s journey is not just through space but through memory, culminating in a realization that the past is never quite as it was, and the present is always on the verge of slipping away.

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