Flânerie
The only problem with the flâneur is that he did not exist, except as a type, an ideal, and a character in literature. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
I beg to differ, despite this being literature & me a character,
my long-dead friend Ron, too, pumping his piston legs
along Powderhouse, floppy bowl-cut flopping more as we herky-
jerked across Alewife Brook Parkway’s torrent of cars & up
the Wallace short-cut to the train, thrusting a joint back & forth,
Oil Can Boyd no doubt already gabbing Gedman’s ear off
in the bullpen, Fenway’s grilled sausages not for years yet a cliché,
Ron & I having gulped lifelong in a dreamland soda fountain
of post-shift euchre & pierogi picnics what a poem I just read calls
”the vanilla malt of white privilege.” We nevertheless not only
dug (yes, dug) without self-consciousness Son House, Albert Ayler
& Parliament Funkadelic, but also revered Forbes Field visions
of Big Bob Veale & the sublime Clemente. The word cowardice festers,
Ron going fast, then gone & me so free to keep his suffering
far away & then grief or what passed for it stabbed & cloaked
as I strolled, loitered, shuffled, strutted & strode all over
the city because I still had springy legs & lungs & enough leisure
to savor a cheese danish outside the gutted caboose
where they fried the glorious chimichangas I’d bear through
the steamy night home. I felt free to ignore what I wished
without knowing I wished it. No, it’s murkier than that, more
tangled & rank. Cognition evades. Abstractions never
walked nor lost all will to walk. Really? Wow, that’s deep!
Maybe not deep as the cave—OK, the labyrinth—
gusting reek & roar nonstop, but deep as grief & gratitude go.
