Every time a bus rushes out of the tunnel into Harvard Green and Mass Ave. air, I wonder how your accent blossoms when it returns to roots, the Carolinian twang coming to your shoulders like a raincoat in the rain, the kind of beauty that slips the strictures of aesthetic delineation and honeys itself into a swell-the-chest humming.
There are faces and sunlight on the bus, a woman quilting and a grandmother warbling up the steps with bending shopping bags — It’s a club of How’s your wife’s? (Mormons be advised of the apostrophe.)
The never-ending Boston Marathon of lovers breaking into a run, a stroll, a sarcastic king-of-court commentary on the bus swaying on its engine through Berklee towards the South End: Look at this mook, eh?
Passing one street vendor asking the other, Do you have enough ice for today? I invoke the right to bend the city to my feet.
This is the city of the never-ending run, the camera across the street, the frame folding its clarity into a joyful blur, the mutual raucous ringing: Why does this city have the best songs? Sinatra is stuck on t-shirts ‘til the end of time, London has a murderous barber, but we have dirty water, skinheads on the MBTA, drivers announcing the score over the intercom, all standing because David Ortiz is coming to the plate, visiting Peruvian poets spotting a fellow countryman busking folksongs and joining in chorus across the divide, kids in expensive bear suits making a show of fumbling for the morning paper, the slow, scattered pocket of students discovering in that quiet J-curve that they can hang upside-down on the Red Line late some pass-over-the-Charles night, that montage of trees along the esplanade snapping back and forth between drybone winter and snapping-flowers-out-of-the-sleeve foliage, cannons pealing over the Charles sluicing through the vibrating microtones of the calvary of bells on the charge and lift the lungs to swing from the rafters of the clouds.
At first I thought it was a bee having a heart attack in my coat jacket, but it was my heart and you the city, shouting, Boston!
This is the Boston where horses once plowed into cows on the Common in the middle of the night, flinging the driver to his death, the Boston where Lowell thought on ghosts, his letter to Ezra half-finished in his pocket, folded, C.K. Williams sat in the library, folded in a book, and Updike watched another Williams, where assholes tried to use the flag as a javelin, where commuter rail riders use their tiny tickets as fans, despite us offering something a little larger, like a napkin, where the Jenny Lewis look-a-like bartender in North Station watches the TV all by her lonesome, and antennae skitter atop brother buses skittering across the city.
I came to Boston from California — and might go there again, feet-depending — willingly embracing all roots, gargling patois, and thin-lined nasal snits. How can you refuse as a home a place that calls itself the Hub of the Universe? The Athens of the East? This is a land where revolutions begin and nations are set in motion.
Boston’s third man is Jonathan Richman, who knows he’s crazy, so what’s the fuss of fussing over this? Boston’s fourth is statesmen and the state looking for men to trot up the steps to Beacon Hill. Boston’s fifth is the soldier: already marching, yes, on our way.
Oh, Boston, why the singing? Though before we say why let’s kick this off with how we fly our wordy flag — two-three-four!
