17 million dollars for a house

the cab driver calls me a pretty little thing
as i get in. he starts talking quickly,
saying,
every cab in the world
got Black Ice car freshener,
but he likes this here
blue car freshener
called
New Car Smell
and the green one—he don’t know
its name no more,
but it
makes sure the cab don’t smell like cigarettes. “it don’t smell like
cigarettes in here, right?”
i say no, it doesn’t and
he says his favorite air freshener is
a light blue one
with a picture of the flower bouquet on it,
but they don’t sell that one
anywhere no more.
Everybody likes it too much.
it smells like baby powder,
soft and sweet
like baby powder.
he says all his
kids grown up now.
and his son’s got a new girlfriend every week, but his son’s going
to have to get married soon, gonna have to settle down soon.
time goes by so fast. so fast,
he wants to know
if i know that.
i say
i know.
i know that
because i’m always meeting people
left with only car fresheners
for reminiscing.
he asks me if
I see that house over there.
i tell him
i see it.
he says that house cost 17 million dollar,
and that’s a lot of money.
he says he wouldn’t buy a house
that cost so much unless there were
something really special about it.
i look at it, trying hard to imagine
what could be so special about it,
but i haven’t thought anything
was that special in a long while.
he asks if I know the boston common.
I say
I know it.
he says
that used to be a dairy farm. then the owner gave it to the People of Boston,
and the homeless slept there, but the police kept kicking em out, so there was a big court case,
and now the police can’t do that no more.
because everybody in boston owns a piece of Boston Common.
“Except you because you from New York.”
he says,
and i think about that for a couple minutes,
how i don’t own anything but my shoes
and my headaches,
not even a piece of the oldest city park in the united states.
i don’t own anything, so I ask
You ever think about driving a cab in New York
City?
and he says “you gotta know New York City. Gotta know it like you know your
own body,”
so i tell him
every time, i’m in new york city,
i feel like I know it
like i know my own elbows.
and he says
There already 30,000 cabs in New York City,
and there still ain’t enough people who know it like that.
he wants to know how much the fare starts out at
over there in the Big City.
I say
$2.50
and he says
here, in boston, it’s $2.60. See, he says,
I’m a whole ten cents richer here
and I got me a nice piece of the boston common
to sleep on
when i need to.
Then he plays the radio
all the way
to the Route 128 train station,
where i stand on the platform edge,
feeling like I’m toeing the line of some great cliff.