UP ON JOY STREET

Beacon Hill
was not so quiet
in the icy November
as Robert Lowell
passed show dogs
near a hydrant
on Joy Street
under a lantern's twilight
by red brick cornices
of my college days,

If only I could call back
to you from life's mystery
a professor would day "Yes"
to a writ of congealed voices
translate you as a novice
from the thick darkness
as a poet-confessor in history,

Perhaps the evergreen trees
has dropped their acorns
to remind us
of a chorus of song birds
still wounding
my perpetual adolescence
as a marathon passes by
angled by a scholar's eye
hearing water music
over the Charles River
my memory of this hour
never parched or drowned
over the mythic bridge
where sailboats load
to deliver passengers
to the emerging underground.