Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.
The old South Boston Aquarium standsin a Sahara of snow now.
Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;my hand tingled to burst the bubblesdrifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.
My hand draws back.
I often sign stillfor the dark downward and vegetating kingdomof the fish and reptile.
One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanizedfence on the Boston Common.
Behind their cage,yellow dinosaur steamshovels were gruntingas they cropped up tons of mush and grassto gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civicsandpiles in the heart of Boston.a girdle of orange,
Puritan-pumpkin colored girdersbraces the tingling Statehouse,shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shawand his bell-cheeked Negro infantryon St.
Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,half of the regiment was dead;at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat.
Its Colonel is a leanas a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gentle tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now.
He rejoices in man's lovely,peculiar power to choose life and die-when he leads his black soldiers to death,he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greensthe old white churches hold their airof sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flagsquilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the
The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldiergrow slimmer and younger each year-wasp-waisted, they doze over musketsand muse through their sideburns…Shaw's father wanted no monumentexcept the ditch,where his son's body was thrownand lost with his "niggers."The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;on Boylston Street, a commercial photographshows Hiroshima boilingover a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"that survived the blast.
Space is I crouch to my television set,the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shawis riding on his bubble,he waitsfor the blessed break.
The Aquarium is gone.
Everywhere,giant finned cars nose forward like fish;a savage servilityslides by on grease.
The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,a glistening armadillo left the scene,rose-flecked, head down, tail down,and then a baby rabbit jumped out,short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!- a handful of intangible ashwith fixed, ignited eyes.
Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cryand panic, and a weak mailed fistclenched ignorant against the sky!
