Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”
–Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

The VFW Commander in his flat Boston voice
intones the names of the dead:
DeStefano, Haratoonian, Donnelly, O’Neil.
Sweating, Buddha-fat babies watch; their
shrunken grandmas sag into low lawn chairs.
The high school band follows the route we have
marked for them. They play like experts, but they can joke,
knowing they have a few years before they sink
into the chairs along the way.
In this town, Lowell checked himself in
to the loony bin
and glimpsed his future in the faces
of the other mental cases.
(Plath too, and Ray Charles.)
Once John Birch HQ, it knows fear.
Cambridge public housing blocks stand in sight: warnings.
The lady selling cones from the ice cream truck
wears a hijab. Belmont’s Finest march to the tune
of Valley Forge, Custer’s ranks,
San Juan Hill and Patton’s tanks.
And the ditch, it comes closer each year.
Blank shots over the town’s war graves.
The bones hear nothing, but the shots and smoke
are for the grandmas, the band, the babies,
for the ravaged veterans of the one war
we all fight alone to the last breath.

Emerson begins his poem “Hamatreya” with a list of names: Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, and the other founders of Concord, Mass. They speak, telling how they made the land theirs, divided it into parcels, and left it to their heirs.

In the second stanza, the earth laughs as these men try to transform her. The narrator says, “The hot owner sees not Death, who adds / Him to his land, a lump of mould the more.” The earth then sings in her own voice: “Mine and yours; / Mine, not yours, Earth endures.” When her song is done, the narrator remarks, “I was no longer brave; / My avarice cooled / Like lust in the chill of the grave.”

That is how Emerson ends. Sixteen decades later, we live not far from Concord. The earth says,

Ralph Waldo is dead, turned to grit and mud.
Eight more generations have wriggled out,
Cried, drunk, grown, worked, shrunk, died since his voice stopped.
To me: a few smooth circuits round the sun.
I’ll still be turning when they all are gone,
When something new crawls on my skin, and then
When nothing stirs, and dawn means plain white light
On silent stone.
But they do swarm on me.
Their houses are like dust, but thick dust now.
My hills are hard to notice from their car
Windows as they fly down tarmac ribbons,
Burning carbon they draw from inside me.
I whose motion is endless, effortless
Salute their grim, relentless harvesting.
What are they to me? Just some of my mass,
Quivering briefly on my dry surface.
Yet when I ask what they are, what I am,
What each is for, I find I use their words.
They taught me my Concord was beautiful,
Its misty lowlands and its pale green hills.
If they asphyxiate or cook themselves,
Who will remember the Concord they found?
I am no longer brave.

Half an hour before the concert starts, I watch the audience file in. The average age is well above seventy; the husbands look slight and bleached beside their wives. A few grandchildren wearing bows and shiny shoes sit between the couples. In the hangings of the Tapestry Room, Renaissance grandees display their courtly manners. Behind me, someone says, “We used to see Archie Cox there all the time.”

I try to read Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, her farm-girl narrator describing a commuter flight to Green Bay: “Then suddenly we were taking off, racing down the runway and lifting into the air like a carnival ride, the plane with a seabird’s wobble.” It’s her first time in an airplane. Near me, a voice asks, “Did you go to any concerts in Paris?” Answer: “We heard the St. John’s Passion, of which we are very fond.” Apparently, we are not so fond of dangling prepositions.

Moore’s leisurely, descriptive style encourages observation. I remember the tiled floor in this very room from when I first saw it, on a trip with my Dad, at age 17. The Bach-lover behind me is recommending the “film version of Cyrano with Depardieu.” Each French noun is perfectly pronounced, like an excerpt from a language tape. His mouth is capable of switching from Boston Brahmin to gallic r’s and back without slowing appreciably.

My misanthropy now covers the whole audience except maybe the grandchildren. The first piece of music is supposed to rebuke such attitudes. It is a Masonic cantata by Mozart, with German lyrics that recommend: “Love thyselves and thy brothers! Bodily strength and beauty be thy ornament!” I find this advice hard to take, even with Mozart’s sugar-coating.

It’s the Bartok that snaps me out of it, the string quartet exchanging spiky, stochastic phrases, snatches of folk melody, tragic outbursts. The musicians are young, diverse, and intent, interacting with their bodies and faces as well as the sounds they make. The music was new when the audience first heard it and feels new still. It puts up green shoots.

Regressions, pentameters, dialogues,
Memoranda of understanding, plots,
Research contracts, policy briefs, lectures,
Op-eds, philosophical arguments,
Budget narratives, translations, fact sheets,
Hortatory afterwords, blind reviews,
Close readings, scatterplots, interview notes.
These are things I write but not as well
As they are written. I read and relish
Much better than I compose and create.
A poor place to be at age forty-two;
The biography shelf stands in reproach.
I plead restlessness and indiscipline.
Dissatisfaction, ambition, ego–
Susceptibility to the thin charm
Of seeing first name, last name, title in print–
Lure of the easy August downhill path
Plus unconfessed daydreams of synthesis
And a hapless, unquenched love of the world.

Objects in view: one set of sculpted cliffs,
Venerated by the Wampanoags,
Topped by a Yankee lighthouse whose clocklike beam
Won the Paris Exposition prize, one
Steaming sea stirred by an African storm,
One red sunset, one skipping long-limbed child,
My child, whose footprints the sea erases.

Too much to say about all this, too hard
To say it; too many layers, too wide
The scope, from Pilgrims’ footfalls to the trope
Of ocean sunsets as the end of all.
Too much Homer, Arnold, Childe Hassam.
A place we travel hours to admire
Is no sight to try to praise in words.

Better to turn from the loud-resounding sea
To other sites where long-limbed daughters play,
Suns set, and settlers built on worshipped land:
Takeout windows, mowed weeds between sidewalks
And parking lots, driveways, on-ramps, strip malls.
Love not only what glimmers and is vast,
But just as deeply our own darkling plain.