chalk factories and other observations

The only noise is the noise that you carry;
your own clogs scraping, the zipper on your coat,
your inhale and exhalation of frozen breath.

The palette today is washes of grey;
power lines heavy, beaded with pigeons,
barren trees swaying, ripe with finches,
minor motions against a still slate sea.

(In the winter there are no new cars.
Last night you drove through a chalk factory,
just to match the arid pavement, cracked white with salt,
the tawny grass and penciled-in trees.)

Forgetfulness of self, of place, of life itself
can be justified by this:
sudden remembrances and stark unveilings,
when you notice the shape of each grey stone stacked in the walls,
when you realize that dark oak limbs, bent against the sky
are the only thing holding the snow from falling.

the signal man's wife

I am driving Hemingway down Main Street past the RIPTA stop by M. G. Jewelers and across from the Bank.

I wonder what he would take as true and write in his notebook.

He is fanned out across my passenger seat--white-haired and bearded, black-haired and mustached, always tall--gazing up off the torn pages of my paperback volume of A Moveable Feast--split down the binding, splayed in three sections.

He would not fit in the envelope that I mailed to Spain. So he drives with me and reminds me that anything true that I know or see or hear someone say is mine to write down.

Maybe it is the image of the Signal Man's wife, at least eighty, sitting in their Newell Street apartment with her pinkish-red hair piled high, curls across her forehead, lighting a cigarette and flexing her long narrow feet in moccasins as she flips nonchalantly between TV Land and the History Channel.

I rang their bell two minutes ago and have come by to get a photo of him, on the deck of his destroyer escort from World War II, because he was honored by our Senator this week. The photo is small and worn in the center. I can barely make out his features or the ship. I say I'll scan it anyways.

"Sit down he says," and leaves the room.

The apartment walls are bare except for a faded Monet print in a plastic frame. All the end tables are covered with framed photographs--kids I assume are their children, them dancing at a party. Her hair has been red for several decades. Before his hair turned white he still had a short little mustache no wider than his nose, no thicker than his upper lip.

She hands me a box containing his medals, while he settles at a back table to write the list of guests who were at his ceremony on a piece of stationary. She hovers between the couch and the ash tray, telling me how much she loves her caller ID, apologizing that the kitchen table is covered with nearly a dozen pill bottles, and saying how very nice the Senator was, "He's funny," she says. "He's so sharp."

"Don't make me out to be any hero," he tells me as I leave. I promise not to write anything he didn't tell me.

Driving back to my office I consult Hemingway.

What would he think of this city, divided into villages that fan our around old mills?--divided in memory into past and present, a horizon of mill smokestacks and causeways, the sturdy fieldstone and bricks still standing, waiting, silent bell towers and still-turning clocks--the river snaking through.

Everything happens downstairs and next door. Those bay windows face Main Street and go ceiling-to-floor. You can see under the tables pushed up to the window; you can see the diner’s knees, you can see the printed wood paneling through those windows.

I’ve only been inside twice.

On my first day I didn’t realize we were next-door to a restaurant. I drove up behind the office and wondered at the forty glittering cars in the back lot. Who did they belong to? We only have two reporters.

Now I know. They belong to councilmen X, Y, and Z, and councilwoman W, the school committee’s lawyer, and the chair of the democratic town committee. It’s one big breakfast, with all my sources in the same place. If I call them before 11 at their offices, they won’t answer.

They’re reading what we wrote in the paper, over lightly breaded home fries, scrambled eggs, and flavored New England Coffee Company Coffee. They might make some comments to one another across the room. But those comments never settle anything.

Instead of speaking table-to-table, instead of face-to-face, they leave breakfast and call me. They would rather respond in print.

My editor says this is how our paper has stayed alive the past 150 years: because of all the generations of microcosm, because in this town personal squabbles can be published as front-page news.