A Summer in Boston

House on Reed Street, like a tattered button

tin packed with bike parts and three rapidly

aging boys: more upstairs, some stuffed dozen.

I dressed in a closet, smoked through crumbly

plaster cracks. But out of the atrophy

of walls too thin sprawls a stretching nexus,

a key strand to a braided rope city

that tangled me close till I felt deathless.

Jamaica Plain, the Commons, left peony

bulbs beveling in my pedestrian

sight, their augmented Back Bay blooms boldly

sank in my soft brain, unoccupied cushion.

From all corners Boston’s groping ribbons

Wrapped around my head like floral curtains.