Dirty Old Town

I've been reading about branding and thinking about poetry. I have these things I want to say about words but now I don't know how.

I spent Patriots' Day wandering around my city. Alone, without ear buds or iTunes, from the Common through Downtown to the Waterfront, I listened and I watched.

I saw the suits by South Station and wondered if they ever feel like targets, those folk (like my brother) who work in the Federal Reserve building.

You wouldn't get that idea watching dudes on their lunch break, running across to the train station's McDonald's while they commiserate about a coworker with unrealistic expectations.

Just another day downtown.

After being a New Yorker for 3 years, I've always been grateful to feel safer in my own city, my home, which I do not think of as a place you'd want to explode. But I still got a shudder walking by the World Trade Center. The name alone seems to invite evil.

At the Boston Public Library I used to transcribe the poems of a would-be Transcendentalist who shared a meal with Emerson. Copley is where I read my poetry at the wedding of two good friends. Where I got to discuss Wallace Stevens with a Berkeley academic.

And I remember witnessing, years ago, an old man collapse in the square, blood spilling slowly from his brain -- not the first corpse I'd ever seen, and not the last.

What we do in a crisis is always moving: people rush in to help and there's a feeling of being knit together. Then someone asks "Why did this happen?" and the chorus clamors for more death.

The answer to the crisis of our age won't be on Twitter and it won't be on CNN.

But tonight the ghost of John Wieners reads on the library steps. Watch for him. And listen:

Yes rise shining martyrs

out of your graves, tell us
what to do, read your poems
under springtime moonlight.
Rise and salvage our century.