Road Work
July 17 2009


Road work season.
Big yellow machines, belching smoke.
Guys leaning on shovels,
orange vests, muscles, sweat.
Some engineer has decreed the order of things;
but they’ll tear it up next summer
I bet.

We squeeze into single file
under a broiling sun,
heat-waves shimmering-up
windows shut
air-conditioners humming.
The flag girl looks bored.
She is a goddess
in all this testosterone,
in tom-boy clothes
fretting about a farmer’s tan
the blister under her toe.

In real life
she is an English major
working summers.
And in 20 years
a famous author,
she will write about road work.
The line of cars, crawling by.
The man, who caught her eye
for a moment —
tapping his fingers to jazz,
the case of wine, riding shotgun,
the classic Panama hat.
And like all of us
story-tellers,
we never recognize ourselves.

Unwittingly
plagiarizing each other,
making it up
as we go along.



This is how we all go through life, telling stories about everyone we meet, or even incidentally see -- professional story-tellers, or not. We project and we empathize, trying to imagine other people's lives, filling in the spaces, making presumptions, re-playing our own history, shamelessly invoking our prejudices and smug certainties. In other words, "making it up ...as we go along."

I like the misdirection here: how a relatively straight-forward descriptive piece about something we all immediately recognize takes this unexpected turn; how an incidental character suddenly becomes the story; and, ultimately, the conceit of the author in allowing himself to imagine all this about her. Because this is how it really happens: all these enigmatic and mysterious people, flashing past in real life. This sets up the final stanza, in which he is also the object of someone's story ...which, in turn, raises further questions about objective reality ...truth ...self-knowledge.

Of course, I've always been more of a stylist than a philosopher, which means that these big pretentious themes don't interest me as much as nailing a good line, crafting a fine sentence. So my favourite part is actually this: "She is a goddess/in all this testosterone ...". (I had some misgivings over the line "under a broiling sun", such an obviously tired and cliched expression. But what it loses in impact, it makes up in precision, since I was really unable to come up with anything more cogent than "broiling". So I let it stand.) ...I like the title, too! If I saw that listed in a table of contents, I'm pretty sure I'd turn to it first. Which is how I like to test a title: by imagining the table of contents as a delectable box of assorted chocolates, and trying to make every title scream "choose me! choose me!"