sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2023-01-25 04:25 pm

Can't appear inside of nowhere

Despite exhaustion, I did get out of the house yesterday—intending to walk along the Mystic River beside Route 16, my father and I got distracted by what turned out to be the Alewife Greenway Bike Path and followed it until its dead-end in Broadway. Because of exhaustion, it has taken me until now to offer photographic evidence.



Alewife Brook, reflecting the oncoming sunset.



Setting out in the slant light of the sky. I have no pictures of the boardwalk which the path turned into for most of its duration, but it seemed to have been built with serious flooding in mind and indeed several stretches of the ground around it were more reeds and cat-ice than community back yard.



Paging Algernon Blackwood.



At one point on the bank of the brook, we found a small planting of young trees as part of the riparian rewilding of the area. None were individually labeled as opposed to encased in slender tubes of plastic to keep off the rabbits; I am hoping this stone indicates that at least some of them are elms, but even if not, I like the idea of a kind of megalithic field guide to help walkers identify the trees of their surroundings.



Alewife Brook channeled into a kind of canal at the foot of St. Paul Cemetery, whose name I did not know until I got home. Despite a childhood in Arlington and more than the last dozen years in Somerville, I can't remember ever having walked through it before. We quickly figured out it was Catholic.



Most of the headstones were much newer than the dates on them—I had not known that cemeteries were rehabilitated in that fashion. The carved lily of this mid-century example was rare. The lichen gave it a look of life.



I had expected to see much more like this lump of acid-rained soap, whose lichen-dotted presence against the stones of the bridge I appreciated.



I had also missed the existence of a WWII memorial and cemetery on Broadway; I had always associated the American and POW flags flying above the recessed green space with the veterans' center I did know about next door. The snow was full of bronze plates from which the names had melted clear in the sun, almost all of them ending between 1941–45. I have noticed over the years that this city is dense with memorials. I still kind of miss the one for the Spanish-American War. It reminded that it had happened. How do people imagine Puerto Rico got attached to this country?

It is strange and really nice to know that people look for my poems based on lines they remember and other people find the poems for them.
cmcmck: (Default)

[personal profile] cmcmck 2023-01-26 10:04 am (UTC)(link)
There are war graves in cemeteries here, but most people were buried where they fell.