Neighbors

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

—"In a Station of the Metro," Ezra Pound

Boston's MBTA Red Line used to end at Porter Square, until recently the town-gown divide in Cambridge, with working people living north of Porter and east into Somerville's Davis Square and Powderhouse neighborhoods. Now it continues through Davis to Alewife Station with its tiered parking garage for commuters from the suburbs. All this change, along with the repeal of rent control, has transformed the neighborhoods so that Cambridge now has the greatest number of homes worth over a million dollars of any city in the United States, and Somerville's Davis Square is going through the familiar transition from workers to artists to money.

Outside Porter Station a forty-six-foot tall red steel sculpture, "Gift of the Wind" by Susumu Shingu, makes its benefactor visible in a mesmerizing and graceful kinesis above the plaza. A remarkable work, it seems to allude to a weathervane and Ferris wheel and sail and horseshoe crab and lobster all at once while it swivels and dips and turns like a prayer wheel or thurible, its blessings quintessentially New England.

I love the Red Line's public art. Over at the Davis stop are life-size statues by James Tyler of people he recruited from the neighborhood, and people from out of town are always having their pictures taken with them. The sculptor's given them masks. Tourists pose with them to see if they can fool the folks back home, if only for a moment: Who are those people with you? Why are they wearing masks? Oh. Elsewhere the art is themed to the stop; at Kendall/MIT, for example, the walls chronicle the history of scientific and technological discovery, and a button on the wall activates a series of colliding chimes between the inbound and outbound tracks.

On this particular rainy day, just inside the door of Porter station, the flower vendor has her ephemeral inventory arranged in buckets on risers, but it seems futile: who buys flowers on their way to work? At the top of the escalator a man hands each commuter a Metro, a mere outline of a newspaper, little more than headlines and advertising. I take mine and step onto the moving stairs down.

The escalators plunge deep into the earth, the first long ride down bringing you from street level to a plaza with a snack bar, an ATM machine, and a vendor whose cart, depending upon the season, is loaded with baseball caps, sweaters, scarves, gloves, battery-operated fans, and of course incense and prepaid telephone cards. Both vendors, the man with the cart and the man at the snack bar, are clearly Arab, and I have wanted to ask each where he is from but worry the question would seem an affront, my sociable curiosity freighted as it is with history and politics and fear. Next to the vendor's cart a man is selling Spare Change, "The Newspaper By, For, And About The Homeless." He is always there lately, standing with his stack of papers under one arm, holding out a copy to us as we debark the stairs. His left eye might be glass; it stares up and to the left so that the one eye that is fixed on you seems ferocious and accusative. And why should he not be angry? Or his fierce gaze may be serving him as a disguise, a mask suggesting danger, covering his otherwise naked vulnerability. No doubt he is homeless himself, and he seems surrounded by unasked questions about how he came to be here glaring at us and importuning us to buy for a dollar what we wish not to know.

Just ahead of me on the escalator down, a woman is rummaging in a huge purse hanging from her shoulder while her child, a girl about four or five, holds onto the moving black handrail with both hands. This is the next chapter of the descent, an additional hundred and fifty feet or so to the inbound platform; there's still another...