paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary

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Displays

Here is the poem I've been working on this week. I have a few awkwardnesses to mend, but I've been thinking about these connections between world events and personal events lately...

Displays

Our vision led us to Vermont
where we felt we had been before
but forgot how to live there
and missed our life in the old part
of Boston. On TV people crowded
the Brandenburg Gate, attacked the wall
with hammers, pulled the wall
into their celebrations, the forbidden
now a souvenir. We watched people
crowd reunited streets and discovered
political reality means how one person
treats another. A friend sent a piece
of the painted concrete in a velvet covered,
cardboard jewelry box with a note: �the wall
lives in my mind.� We tried to imagine
what it meant.

That spring we returned
to where we had lived before,
a brick oven neighborhood
where the old people sat in folding chairs
on the sidewalk. We listened
to them joke about pied pipers
relocating rats about to be unearthed
by the Big Dig. Having evolved underground,
the rats, visionless and vigilant, lived
by scent and taste. I put the lid down
on the toilet seat in case myths come true.
We didn�t know what kept us
in our basement apartment,
laughable jobs, distracting relationship.

We discovered incrementalism
means change becomes obsolete
before anyone has figured out the details.
In two years the city started burying
the central artery, hired biologists
to keep the rats from running
through the streets. In two years
we stared at each other on Tremont Street
and I decided not to recognize
how familiar you looked.
Even the old part of the city
changed: People began to revitalize it,
seeing again possibility and chance,
while I saw how backs of billboards,
endless brick walls and smokestacks
junked up the horizon around me.

11:44 p.m. - 2003-04-06

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