Chapel and Olive
Cold and nearly chilled through, we’re walking up Chapel Street,
home from the park at Wooster Square, passing the Polish mortuary
recently developed into condos, the boarded up Lutheran Church
doubtless also soon to be, and Salvino’s Flower Shop, always dark
and without flowers now as the owner died in June. Christmas lights
wink on and off around the tall, sashed windows of a stick Victorian
though it’s the last day of December and not yet mid-afternoon.
Grinding along Chapel, an empty city bus steams the frigid air
with exhaust, its giant tires churning the street-chopped snow.
Have I mentioned yesterday’s storm? Our narrow side-streets
and sidewalks remain mostly unplowed and it’s an adventure
side-stepping banks of fresh snow. Because you hold my arm
to keep from slipping I can’t hold yours. Yet being held by you
steadies me all the same. We understand why geese fly south
and the rich buy second homes in Florida. . . why the park’s
unshoveled paths were empty today. People fall here in winter.
They slip, break a bone or hip, often don’t recover. They fall
even without the distractions of squirrels leaping tree to tree
or you pointing out to me, as we walked, the black fallen branches
like bent arms grounded on the park-lawn’s snow. The thicker limbs
reminded you of Franz Kline’s paintings and your saying it made me
see it too. Now stopped at the red light, our breaths cloud out
into the intersection as we talk about Kline’s zenishness, the empty
fullness of his canvas spaces and how yesterday’s strongest winds
probably struck the park late in the day to bring down such heavy
limbs, dropping them so elegantly atop the new snow. Another
bus groans by. Snow muffles the city’s winter noises, waffles
the chain link fences white. A delivery truck fish-tails to a stop
as the signal at Olive turns green. We’re ready to step off the curb
and Chapel stretches ahead of us, a straight uphill mile past Yale
to the hospital. But though we haven’t come far or have far to go
I’m tired. Still unrecovered. Not yet myself. And caught now
by memories of an air-conditioned surgical suite. . .my thin gown,
the chilled steel bedrails, the one nurse needling an IV into my arm
while another whispered positive affirmations in my ear. A voice
tells you to count backwards. So you count into darkness. When
you wake they tell you to walk. So you walk. And though with cancer
it’s always too early to speak of cure, they tell you to live “as if,”
to plan a full future anyway. Now crossing Olive street, I practice
their method. I picture arriving at my building, stomping snow
from boots, opening the door to a warm, high-windowed apartment
where maybe you’ll sketch for a while or stretch out on a sofa
and leaf through the Joan Mitchell book you gave me for Christmas.
I’ll brew coffee, eat a chocolate cookie from the tin, wonder
whether the corner of Chapel and Olive might figure in a poem.
Maybe I’ll make notes, write a line or two about the park
and how this year ended. . .walking together without falling,
chatting about art, yesterday’s storm and the lovely, black-on-white
branches on the park snow. Maybe a poem will make more of it.
Or maybe my lines will end where they began. . .at a winter intersection,
the red light against us, yet taking heart as a green light beckons,
setting out arm in arm across Olive Street’s snow-smeared pavement,
touched by what we can’t control or forget, yet letting hope
have its way with us, as we walk together toward home.