About the Author
Splitting an Order
I
Two Men on an Errand
The younger, a balloon of a man
in his sixties with some of the life
let out of him, sags on the cheap couch
in the car repair shop’s waiting room.
Scuffed shoes, white socks, blue trousers,
a nondescript gray winter jacket.
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
