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