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The Street Where You Lived
by Earl Coleman

Wherever you lived growing up
which might have been South Side of Anywhere
or Marleybone, Les Halles, you’d know the place.
I’m talking neighborhood
before we had been slipped a Mickey D and malled.s

Trolleys tied the neighborhoods together
with their skeins of track until GM
bought up the lines and trashed them
so we’d need their cars.

Mister Jones or Smith or Finkelstein sold groceries.
There was a Chinese laundry down a set of basement steps.
The butcher Mueller always gave fair weight. Each corner
had its own saloon with salted plate of nuts for free.
Mister Goldenson was skinny as his needle, maybe five foot one.
There was a bookstore blocks away, run by
a Mister Sheridan who knew more words than anyone.

The stature of these men
comes back to us with some surprise
although I think that we were smaller then,
before the globe became our toy balloon.
Perhaps all history is filtered this way
through our idiosyncratic eyes:

there was a time, when we were human size.