Boundaries

All week I will be driving to the seminar 
in Concord; all week I will be passing
a red-bearded construction worker
by the side of Route 9 in the 7 a.m. sun.
Light flares off the gold hair on his forearms;

red dust rises all around him.
They are building a new road,
and he holds a wooden pointer at the boundary
between the shoulder and the one passable lane.
He keeps cars going like cows through a chute.

He wears a yellow hard hat,
doesnt look up.
The next day he sits in the same position,
the same folding chair.
I begin to imagine hes been there all along

holding the pointer through the wide afternoon
letting dusk settle around his shoulders,
keeping it steady all night.
I wonder what he thinks about all day
in the clouds of exhaust, in the heat rising.

The following day, for miles past him
I construct him a life: a trailer,
wife bringing cornbread and beans to him,
a beer, maybe two, television to light
their evening, the bed moving under them.

At night in my dream he appears at my door
holding a bouquet of Joe-Pye-weed,
asking me to change his life.
Day in, day out, all that week I think about him—
while Im walking the dog, weeding tomatoes.

He is the fixed point;
I am nothing to him
in the endless line of bumpers passing.
Today, certain Im invisible,
I drive past a last time.  He is standing

watching the bulldozer roll the  earth over
but suddenly he turns—and against the blur
of dust lifting and sun falling
in rivers of light through the trees,
he looks up—he waves at me.

I keep the intimacy of that instant,
past mile markers, past the low marsh, 
past the dark grove of white pine,
past milkweed releasing froth to the wind,
toward the lucent black eye of a pond.

 

© Patricia Fargnoli