In Cambridge my friends have aged
like artifacts. Seeing them lean
against bookshop windows I share
the bulk of their sullen abdomens,
the grief of their sagging eyelids.
After years of flailing at books,
none of us has broken the sound
barrier, none of us invented
the microchip that would obsolesce
the human brain. Instead, we tilt
and sway as we wander from job
to job, health insurance canceled,
Ezra Pound and Charles Olson
long dead, generations of students
launched like missiles into the blue
where they blossom in showers of sparks.
We've aged, but my friends remained
in the city where their weight seems
private, something to clutch to one's self
like a purse of twenty-dollar bills.
In rural New Hampshire, where I taste
frozen spruce woods every morning
as I embrace the daily round,
my overweight seems entropic,
central to the winding-down
of the universe that moves the stars
as far out of touch as it can.
In Cambridge, though, even the hats
my friends wear proclaim them innocent
of the new books, recent recordings,
current films. Leaning against
the windows of the Harvard Book Store,
we feel terrible gases quarrel
below the waist, feel the new books
suffer under covers too bold
to honestly describe the contents.
We feel each other's appraising glance
kindly as the stainless tool
the doctor uses to lance one's
favorite if most painful boil.
