Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He is out of bounds now. The ditch is nearer.
Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. The Aquarium is gone. Frank Bidart is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2002. Next year he will publish a chapbook titled Music Like Dirt. His tenth book of poetry, Breathing Room, was published last year.