beginnings, middles and ends

A white van just delivered a Christmas present, boots from my twin brother Chris. They are green and made of soft suede, but I will not open the package yet. I am saving them for a trip to Boston in the Spring.

My last post was a poem about beginnings, middles and ends from my favorite poet, Billy Collins. I love the way he describes these stages in snapshots; the multiplicity of images for each word makes me think differently about our obsession with linearity, the idea that my life is going from a horizontal Point A to Point B to Point C, with spaces in the middle to signify each stage, and then it will be over. In contrast, all at the same time, I feel I am at the beginning, middle, and ends of many things. I tend to think of time as not linear, but more like a spirograph, or a repeating circle, except it is one of those spirographs that never turned out right: the center was always moving, and so the circles never exactly met in the middle, but it was close enough to make some things overlap. I recently read in an article about Dirk Nowitski (he went on a walkabout after last season) that Aborigines in Australia believe that the past and the future travel with you in the present. I really like that idea, and I can see that working with my spirograph. Crossings are so much more interesting if you can rely on things from the past to help you see the future clearly.

Like most of you reading this (I'm assuming), I like to take walks. Many famous writers have loved walking, including Pound and Hemingway. I just realized that I like to walk more in the winter than in the summer; there is something about walking in my street clothes in the cold that reminds me of my time in graduate school in Boston. I used to get off of the T (the subway) a couple of miles before the Boylston stop for Emerson and walk through Back Bay in the morning, just to walk early as the sun was rising and see Boston waking up as I went. I would usually stop and get a coffee, holding it carefully as my boots clomped on the red cobblestones and the bells jangled as the shopkeepers opened doors and hosed off the sidewalks. I remember striped green-and-white awnings and cursive sale signs. I remember white children's layettes and alphabet blocks in some windows and tiny chocolate cakes on trays in others. I smelled cinnamon and I smelled fish bones and I smelled snow. I smelled grease and paper and leather. I walked past courtyards and flower pots and ripe tomatoes. I walked past people sweeping and skulking and kissing in doorways. I walked through Boston on those early mornings, and I felt as if I walked through my whole life.

Though I enjoy my walks around campus and around my neighborhood, I miss those Back Bay streets. Sometimes I drive downtown just to walk on concrete, to feel the solidness of a city, even though some would scoff at that notion. I'm looking forward to the trip to Boston in March, and to walking and to walking and to walking. I know I will feel the past underneath my feet and the future pushing me onward to the public gardens, where the swans are swimming in lazy circles, and their wings make ripples in the dark water.