Landlocked

Alan Feldman

What am I doing, trudging around Natick, Massachusetts,

so archetypal（原型的） in its split-level, clapboard（护墙板） ordinariness,

one house after another like a crowd gathered haphazardly

at an accident site? And why explore the deafening

blandness of the little streets with fenced-in yards,

where day after day -- iPod loaded with arias --

Ti prego, rubami il cuore! -- I wheel the baby, who will not quiet

unless she's rolling along through a landscape, however dull,

a child who will grow up some day with the sole ambition

of leaving home. And why keep pretending

the sunlight gives the brick walls a ruddy, Hopper-esque gravitas? --

It's a dullness that approaches yoga, a meditation,

a boredom so exquisite it's like nonbeing,

from which even the faint fanfare of cobalt blue shutters

can't wake me -- sleep-laden, like a boat covered with a tarp --

though here I am, navigating the seismic faults of the sidewalk

with the side-tracked stroller, in a pebble-strewn jiggling

the baby seems to need for her peace. Ah, this do-nothing

self-abnegation of walking the streets of Natick, Massachusetts,

and its neighborhoods -- as if life has hardly emerged yet from sleep,

that first sleep, and -- like an infant struggling to turn over --

the soul wants to buy a ticket to anywhere

that's out of town, like Venice, say, where the lacy facades

weep into the tarnlike byways and boulevards,

and there's a music of world-weary, self-extinguishing tragedy

to fight with the sun-spangles on the water