My Sewing Room

November 7, 2023

When I am overcome with the frivolity of complaints I once called pain
and what once instilled such righteous anger
as to inspire a clever barrage of my arsenal of words,
I retreat here to this hideaway,
with guilty resignation to my failure to find heroism, in myself or others.
Here, where I can ascribe apathy to the artifacts of aging.
Here, to this place with a door I often keep closed
except for the plaintive cries of the cat.
He is so much easier to appease than cries of injustice and genocide.
He vows not to nest in the just-cut fleece and I believe him,
despite the fact that he always lies.
There’s so much of that going around.

My sewing machine is positioned between two windows
to a point of view that never obliges me to have an opinion or choose sides.
I can simply be a silent observer from this fifth story post
of the unremarkable ongoings on the street below,
silent until evening, when workers emerge
from the cool gray canvas of the government office across the street,
releasing their buttoned-down testosterone
by revving up their insufficiently mufflered Toyotas
as if they we muscle cars.
I remove my hearing aids,
there are far worse things to enrage me
if I were up to choosing rage.
But not here, not in this room with a view
of the parking lot that will soon be charcoal silk
spread before the recently cleared lot
where once sat an abandoned warehouse
as bedraggled as the old men I’d watched
stumbling into the side door by moonlight.
I worried briefly about where they would go now.

But for me, with that rattrap gone,
I can see the welted seam of railroad tracks
that once transported economic boom to a string of mill towns.
Now, if I happen to peer east at just the right moment,
I catch the graffiti-covered cars of a solitary freight train
pulled across my world view by silent stagehands
against a backdrop of weary trees
still wearing the faded crepe of last summer’s fashion,
perhaps too traumatized by the shock of the demolition
to change into peak autumn couture.

Beyond them, the interstate is a corduroy of cars and trucks
swishing like the sound your pants make when walking,
until the grumble of an eighteen-wheeler interrupts.
This too once bothered me,
but it is not the whistle of bombs about to demolish entire communities,
of hospitals and schools and broken bodies that were once families.

My windows only show the peaceful Merrimack
just on the other side of the highway,
sateen shades of gray, peeking shyly through the threadbare curtain
of what’s left of autumn leaves.
The opposite bank is lined with dark slender sentries already denuded
on watch for the ice flow soon to come.
A field of grassy taupe behind them
awaits its first white wool blanket.

There is yet another stand of trees beyond the field, no longer stunning.
Like me, they seem tired and waiting for the worst of it to pass,
for the inevitable coming of spring on the other side of winter.
The hill behind them meets the horizon with a frayed pine edge,
hunkered down for the long game,
sharing give and take with the gray voile sky,
they remain
ever green.

I turn to my sewing,
Hours pass
Pain free.