I'm going to read--
I'm going to read the Wordsworthian poem
that Alison was referring to.
And this is a poem that takes place
in the neighborhood in which I live.
My daughter-- I live in Cambridge in Massachusetts
on the other side of the Charles River from Boston.
It's very much an urban place.
It's very much a city.
But it also has a kind of village quality.
And East Cambridge, which is close to where I live and
is where my daughter went to elementary school--
and so as a consequence, I'd walk through a lot every day
on the way to bring her and get her from school--
was a kind of, in a way, almost a
returning to a certain element of my childhood.
It's very much-- it's a Portuguese neighborhood.
My mom's family is Portuguese.
And I grew up in the Portuguese part of Fall River.
But it's also-- because it's Cambridge, it's kind
of a very international place.
So there's like admixtures of other ethnicities.
And there's just a great street life there.
And I feel like at a certain point in my writing,
that street life became a real important part of existence
for me.
It became much more interesting than the I
that Alison was talking about.
And it became a place to go and to be absorbed by,
to be taken out of one's self by it.
So I think that's sort of what this is about.
So there is a subway stop in East Cambridge.
It is the end of the green line, the so-called green line
of the MBTA.
And it is called the Lechmere Station.
And I always felt that somehow, the idea of Wordsworth writing
about the leech gatherers in the pub somehow
attached itself to that subway station.
"Wordsworthian."
"The brain bounces forward too, right?
So why return to what yesterday seemed to be becoming
before it became today?
No need for meanness or envy.
No reasons for fear when waking in the morning.
Just an unlikely Rose of Sharon blooming by the branch library
and the balanced light of a warming
late October as it shines on a sheet
of weak-old social studies homework dropped only recently
from the book bag of a wandering Violet Neff.
5 points extra credit--
according to Ms. Dinardo, a nice job.
'Nice job,' said the Tibetans by lugging the rolled up rugs
to air in front of Yayla Carpets,
mostly the smaller prayer mats that are colored with
clairvoyant vegetable dyes.
'Nice job,' says the scent of heavenly inventions like
the breakfast plantains frying.
'Well done,' says the toddler with the jellyfish haircut.
'All answers perfect,' say the hedgerows of boxwood left
untrimmed by the vestry at St. Augustine's, a coven
of swallows with ADD muttering one-liners within.
'Perfect,' say the chicken legs in the freezer case at Fresh
Killed Poultry while you wait for the 91 to the green line
at Lechmere, a vaguely Wordsworthian subway stop,
you think, because the brain knows it's well within its
rights to do so, a second or two before it occurs to you
to wonder if Ms. Dinardo's grading is strict.
'So what if it is?'
thinks the brain.
'I can still imagine her first name is Julie whenever
I'd like.'
[LAUGHTER]
Violet Neff, the girl who dropped--
there is a Violet Neff, actually.
And she's a friend of my daughter's.
And she knows she's in the poem, but she's never--
and I've never wanted to be like, hey, did you notice that?
What do you think of that, huh?
And she's never said anything.