You know where we are, right?
By the clunker Victorian with peeling paint
"the purple house!" when I was eight,
where inside you’d find relics
like people used to
in Egypt and Europe:
yellow Art Deco alarm clocks and useless silver tongs
for picking up sugar cubes
because who uses those anymore?
Warren Spahn’s rookie card
inside my father’s notebook from fifth grade
where he condemned his brother
as a joke for being born
on April Fool’s day
between French sentences
and colonial maps,
all balanced on tall glasses for sipping vermouth
thin as a beaker
like you always found
littering the snow
by the harbor in December.
All this junk isn’t that
and it teaches a lesson.
For one,
I don’t think the past is past
but it can be present,
and I know this
from the time I opened the washer too soon
and flooded the basement.
Maybe you can’t tell
but I read too much David Berman,
so similar sounding loops fill my head
while I walk down the street
like a raisin.
And the big houses on the neighborhood hill
that were stations
on the underground railroad
still offer explanation
for why our hill is named after
pills
or, if you like,
old Boston physicians.
