She with her long hair held by bandanas,

     pulling her children in a red wagon

past the vacant lot, the boarded up storefronts, 

     

     graffitied windows, Day St. to Minden 

and the glass-strewn school playground, 

     just outside the projects.  Her serene smile.

The neighborhood 1970s Boston, hard times 

     and arson, triple-deckers going up in smoke, 

big flakes of ash soaring across blocks.  

     Not her name, but her story remains:  

how God, she said, stopped her ears for days, 

     made her deaf to her mother’s funeral, 

to comforters and their pious consolations.  

     Sixteen, alone in her room, she watched stars 

like fireflies, she said, stars behind stars, 

     and every pulse of light was her mother. 

Among the lessons of that neighborhood:

     her trust in the long silence, its mothering dark, 

the night married to its stars, as if loss 

     always weds something opposite,

and walking with her it was almost possible

     to believe, to see beyond piled trash, 

shot-out streetlights, the world’s glowing core, 

     its shine in all of us, our rough mix 

of artists, organizers, junkies and retirees

     feeling trapped on their rundown steps.

Years ago.  The block’s been gentrified⎯

     I want to say ruined⎯now.     

And now, half-floating beside me

     she brings back our neighbor Lenny

on the sidewalk again, sweeping up the glass 

     he hurled the night before, as if to say, 

when his two sons come sullen down the steps 

     with book bags and violin, that little soft shoe 

he does, the sad shuffle and shadow jab in air?

     It’s the only way he knows.