Nostalgia: Four Sonnet
Permutations

I. Old Burying Ground
Church Street, Cambridge, MA

The stones were balder then; they said: here lies
the body, not an angel or a saint. 
The years, too, take me by surprise—
some lived to three weeks, some to ninety-eight.

The skulls for each don’t vary in their size. 
The ground before them bulges or deflates; 
the city crowds against the leaning gates,
their rotted cheeks by jowls privatized. 

I passed this gate each day for seven years
and never came inside. No Hawthornes here,
no Reveres. Just ten Elizabeths,
their plain stones and pedestrian deaths
now legible because I missed this place.

II. Ex

We fell in love the year that Facebook spawned. 
I made you join to link us in the net, 
unmoored our status three months later, set
you off into the blue. By the time it dawned

on me to seek you out again, you were gone. 
I misjudged the future Internet,
the prevalence of your name. I haven’t yet
skimmed you from the scum of online ponds. 

The thing I really want to know I won’t
track down, even if I match your name
and face: do you type my unusual name?
Itch to hook the fish and throw it back? 
Follow but deny the follow back? 
I can’t be that forgettable. I won’t. 

III. Time Piece

When we’re together, time is never right.
Your arms no longer close around me like
the pocket watches you kept in your dorm drawer. 
(I know you don’t collect them anymore.)

This afternoon, the space inside the hour
you promised shrinks between the three and four, 
expands between our hands. Your hands wound tight
around your phone, my hands open, quiet.

Before, you meant it when you said invite.
We’ve shared a hundred meals, a hundred nights:
sashimi, picnic, closet, mattress, floor.
They fold inside the shove you give the door.

I’m the fool who made the time for you.
The years we loved each other snap the springs:
Are we at the end of our unwinding? 
Driving away, I cross the river that used to bring
me to you, a boundary I never asked for.
It’s dirtier than I remember,
smaller.

IV. Backwards

I thought I loved a place when actually
it was a person. The person then turned out
to be a feeling. The feeling was despair
and coming home, the story goes. Where
the memory remembers more about
the place than what we paid for it to be. 

Nostalgia is expensive. The prices rose
since I last lived here, the roses multiplied.
The Friday night stalwart’s doors are closed,
the houses flipped to show their shiny side.

My street feels short, the building recomposed,
even my memory gentrified. 
Nostalgia, I remember now, arose
from despair and coming home, the story goes.