On Broadway in Cambridge at dusk
I feel comfortable wooden buildings
relax as rush-hour traffic soars,
fuelled by impossible motives.
I used to be famous on this street,
painting Paul Weiner's apartments
and antique shop, walking three miles
from my six rooms on Harvard Street
to my desk at Emerson College
where I frightened students to write.

The lack of love that hissed and snarled
in those shabby classrooms fizzled
when exposed to the tall gray sky
over Broadway, the lit bodega,
the Portuguese restaurant, the rival
funeral homes, Greek revival houses,
garages, Hurley's Auction House,
and the massive brick apartment blocks
on Dana Hill.

                              I wasn't happy,
lacked both future and past. But now
that's my past, and I can walk it
from Kendall to Harvard Square, kids
in the playground by the Catholic school
dunking winter baskets on a numb
concrete court, the wind as low
and fast as a car crash.

                                    Sad
old streets renewed by siding
and bronze anodized windows.
Down Ellsworth a famous poet
lives. I'd rather not run into her
because I'd droop like a frost-killed
sunflower. Now past the library,
I detour down Trowbridge where
a critic hunkers like a troll
in her awkward condominium.
She'll never know I've come this close
to her privacy.

                         For me, though,
the streets so reek of my presence
that privacy's impossible,
every building naked to my gaze--
the entire length of Broadway,
crosshatched by various side streets,
a time-line on which I'm plotted
like a series of minor conflicts
spread over years so otherwise dull
no one can remember them.