Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.

The point of living in the world is just to stay interested.

If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.

Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love.

If there are to be rules, they must be articulable and defensible, like etiquette. I do not do anything simply because my family did it. I do things because they make sense, and because they are elegant.

For though I was raised Protestant, my true religion is actually civility. Please note that I do not call my faith “politeness.” That’s part of it, yes, but I say civility because I believe that good manners are essential to the preservation of humanity— one’s own and others’— but only to the extent that that civility is honest and reasonable, not merely the mindless handmaiden of propriety.

Whenever “everyone” is doing something, I seek to avoid it. But whenever someone tells me not to do something, that thing has a way of becoming the only thing that I want to do. I

People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention. For

My funny old brain, like those of many poets, has always done its best work sideways, seeking out tricky enjambments and surprising slant rhymes to craft lines capable of pulling their own weight.

like an idiot pitching change into a well that nobody ever said was open for wishing.

I was not a believer in things just changing. One had to try to change them.

Burning a bridge, as any tactician will tell you, sometimes saves more than it costs. I

That I was a success is not apparent now; that I would be a success was not apparent then. Within

Here’s some free advice: Make an honest assessment of the choices you’ve made before you look askance at somebody else’s.” I

The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.

We’ve been here all along, the world seemed to say, waiting for you. What took you so long to find us? I

caelum, non animum mutant, for instance—climate may change, but not character—and

Given that the majority of communication to which we are subjected in a day consists of advertising, if nearly all of that advertising insists on regarding us as pampered children, what does that do to us? It winds us up with a godforsaken second term of smarmy granddad President Ronald Wilson Reagan for one.

New things pop up at the edges, but the middle’s where the money is.

committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable. I

We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.

Time only goes in that one direction.

Maybe I’ll walk by one of my old apartments, the second one I lived in after I first came to the city from that much duller metropolis, Washington, D.C. That

this, they’ve never felt that, they no longer feel anything, they don’t count anymore. I think it’s small-minded. I wish there were more people over sixty here, to tell you the truth.

The old station, the one that stood when I arrived in 1926, was a Beaux-Arts marvel of pink granite and glass and steel that evoked not just travel by rail, but also travel through time: the splendor of an ancient Roman past, plus the possibility of a future where beauty and civic function are not just valued but understood to be in harmony.

What I wanted was that walk: slate and windy, the sky overcast but not threatening rain. I

A woman can never be too rich or too thin or too young, truly.

I despise this ad, and the TV on which it plays with those flashing lights. I mourn the conversations murdered by their juvenile intrusions.