Splitting an Order. Ted Kooser
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His face is pale, and his balding head
nods with some kind of palsy. His fists
stand like stones on the tops of his thighs —
white boulders, alabaster — and the flesh
sinks under the weight of everything
those hands have squeezed. The other man
is maybe eighty-five, thin and bent
over his center. One foot swollen
into a foam-rubber sandal, the other
tight in a hard black shoe. Blue jeans,
black jacket with a semi tractor
appliquéd on the back, white hair
fine as a cirrus cloud. He leans
forward onto a cane, with both hands
at rest on its handle as if it were
a steering wheel. The two sit hip to hip,
a bony hip against a fleshy one,
talking of car repairs, about the engine
not hitting on all the cylinders.
It seems the big man drove them here,
bringing the old man’s car, and now
they are waiting, now they have to wait
or want to wait until the next thing
happens, and they can go at it
together, the younger man nodding,
the older steering with his cane.
110th Birthday
Helen Stetter
Born into an age of horse-drawn wagons
that knocked and rocked over rutted mud
in the hot wake of straw, manure and flies,
today she glides to her birthday party
in a chair with sparkling carriage wheels,
along a lane of smooth gray carpeting
that doesn’t jar one petal of the pink corsage
pinned to her breast. Her hair is white
and light as milkweed down, and her chin
thrusts forward into the steady breezes
out of the next year, and the next and next.
Her eyelids, thin as old lace curtains,
are drawn over dreams, and her fingers
move only a little, touching what happens
next, no more than a breath away. Her feet,
in fuchsia bedroom slippers, ride inches above
the world’s hard surface, up where she belongs,
safe from the news, and now and then, as if
with secret pleasure, she bunches her toes
the way a girl would, barefoot in sand
along the Niobrara, just a century ago.
Near a Mall
On a hot, windy day, at the hour
when people get off work, I saw
along a busy street an Asian man
with long black hair, carrying
a rubber chicken-suit, his arms
clasped round its waist. The chicken,
a good foot taller, half of its air
let out, was alive in the breeze,
its wild-eyed head with red comb
and slack beak bobbing and pecking,
though it was losing, its soft claws
knuckles-down over the concrete.
Passersby were honking and laughing,
giving a thumbs-up, a high-sign
to the little man, his long hair
tossed across his sweaty face,
wrestling his chicken, his place of
employment, within which all day
he’d been making a living,
peering out through a slit
and waving his wings as we passed.
Splitting an Order
I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place,
and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,
observing his progress through glasses that moments before
he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife, and her fork in their proper places,
then smooths the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.
An Incident
On the sidewalk in front of the parking garage, a blind man who has fallen is attended by three firemen, a medic, and two policemen, all of whom squat on their heels and by so doing cover the fallen man with shadow. He sits among them with his legs splayed out, undoubtedly feeling their shadows putting cool hands on his face, and he reaches out a long way through darkness to rest his white fingers on the shoulder of his seeing-eye dog, a big, dull-looking black retriever, whose tongue is dripping, for this is a warm day in October, the afternoon sun tiny but fierce in the sky. The dog’s plain face is bright with uneasy patience and the blind man’s eyes are wide and white, as if a hand had risen up from the darkness inside him and taken his heart in its grip and pulled him down.
Two fire trucks and a squad car idle in the street. People are stopping nearby to see what has happened and what will happen next. Each of us is filled to the throat with some part of the same one fear, as if we had been gathered here to bear it away, and now a few of us turn from the fallen man and walk away or get back into our cars, each of us carrying part of the man’s great fear, and it seems that perhaps because of this he now is feeling better, as he gets to his feet in the opening circle and shakes out his arms as if he were suddenly lighter.
Bad News
Because it arrives while you sleep,
it’s the one call you never pick up
on the first ring. In that pause between
the fourth and what would be the fifth,
in the flare of a lamp you’ve snapped on,
there it is, having waited all night
until it was time to awaken you,
shaping its sentence over and over,
simple old words you lean into
as into a breath from a cave.