Splitting an Order. Ted Kooser

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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 СКАЧАТЬ