Cape Cod Days
Happy to assume the stucco frontages
of this wedding-cake architecture
hide a better deal, a sky pale
as a Post-It. And the weather turns,
flecks a collar, raises it; dots
a blackbird’s plumage with iridescence
fugitive as snow along the north-eastern corridor.
In Back Bay, on Boylston, or Harris
down in Providence, in fact
all down the seaboard, there are options
to slip back into versions of ourselves
that could mount the slope, intuit goings-on
yard for yard, name the feral animal
reiterating its hoarse, two-note offer
from a clearing in the woods. The clouds
are take-out bags, the bags sheeted ghosts,
handles raised to signal another
harmless emergency, or exercise
their blithe, informed choices. Plaid shirts balloon
along the avenue like CEOs on sabbatical,
professors coming up for tenure
or early retirement to suburbs like these,
primed to denounce their neo-
liberal spread with renovations of a white
that could colour-card highlights
on the water and wing the Amtrak swept past
as far up as Portland.
I never made it to Bangor though.