Kandel opens with street gossip and a confession: "they say there's this city ordinance against wandering / I'm guilty." The lowercase start and missing punctuation make it sound like mid-conversation, someone talking as she walks. The title, "Grant Avenue," names a street, and the poem stays in the city, where its enemies are signs and ordinances and its pleasures are "flowers and faces and words." What begins as a joke about breaking a rule grows into a bigger claim: wandering is not an offence or a pastime but the way a person feeds herself on the world.
The humour comes from how she handles the law. She borrows the stiff proverb "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," then undercuts it by listing every prohibition she has actually seen: NO PARKING, NO SPITTING, NO SMOKING, "lots of other NO signs." The capitals make the page look like a street plastered with orders, and the missing commas let the signs pile up in one breathless run. The punchline is built from tiny lines: "but I've never seen a NO WANDERING sign / yet / thank god." That isolated "yet" hangs there like a raised eyebrow, hinting that a city so fond of rules might get round to this one eventually.
Then the poem changes gear. The dictionary offers a neutral definition, "a roaming at will; traveling," and the speaker answers with a flat, confident "I say it's also a way of life." She has moved from other people's authorities, the ordinance and the dictionary, to her own. The central image follows: she is "open to the world / like a sea anemone to a rich green wave." The simile is a little surprising, because an anemone barely moves. It stays put, opens, and lets the current bring its food. So wandering here is less about distance than about receptiveness, and the green wave quietly turns the pavement into an ocean.
The verbs escalate as the poem goes on. She begins gently with "absorb," then moves to "devour" and finally "swallow." "Flowers and faces and words" is soft and alliterative, strung together with "and," but "devour the multitude, swallow the universe" is greedy and hyperbolic, and it contains the poem's only mid-line comma. The universe shrinks until it can be eaten, and eating becomes identity: "all and everything of it becomes myself." Wonder is called "my most essential food," and without it her body "would starve." That word raises the stakes. If wandering is nourishment, a ban on it is not a minor nuisance but a threat to life, which makes the ordinance look absurd. Even her phrase "absolute and alchemical body" is double-edged. "Absolute" sounds like the language of law and philosophy, while "alchemical" suggests a body that turns ordinary street-stuff into something precious.
The ending slows down into a triplet: "a sea creature, a star creature, a human creature." The repeated "creature" levels the three, and the order moves outward from the sea of the anemone to the stars of the swallowed universe, then lands on "human." She is large enough to hold the cosmos but still a living animal with an appetite. The last line, "no men can legislate my being," closes the circle by returning to law through the word "legislate." The choice of "men" rather than "people" may be pointed, since the lawmakers here are imagined as male, though the poem leaves that for the reader to weigh. It is also telling that she says "being" and not "wandering." Laws can regulate actions, but her claim is that they cannot touch what she is.
The poem is significant because it takes a small, funny grievance and makes it into a statement about freedom. The freedom is not only to walk where you like but to pay attention, to be curious and let the world in. Free verse suits that argument well. There is no rhyme and no fixed metre, only the varied lines of a voice that is playful, then fierce, then calm. The poem never loses its humour, and that is why its serious point lands so easily.