Splitting an Order. Ted Kooser

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      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.

      And once the news is out, thrown over

      your shoulders like a threadbare robe,

      you move on cold feet room to room,

      feeling as weightless as a soul,

      turning on every light in the house,

      needing the light all around you

      because it’s a new day now, though still

      in darkness, hours before dawn,

      a day you’ll learn to call that day,

      the first morning after it happened.

Swinging from Parents

      The child walks between her father and mother,

      holding their hands. She makes the shape of the y

      at the end of infancy, and lifts her feet

      the way the y pulls up its feet, and swings

      like the v in love, between an o and an e

      who are strong and steady and as far as she knows

      will be there to swing from forever. Sometimes

      her father, using his free hand, points to something

      and says its name, the way the arm of the r

      points into the future at the end of father.

      Or the r at the end of forever. It’s that forever

      the child puts her trust in, lifting her knees,

      swinging her feet out over the world.

Potatoes

      On a misty, sepia-and-green

      May morning, crossing Iowa,

      I saw from the highway

      a man, a woman, and a horse

      out sowing seed potatoes,

      using a two-wheeled planter

      from a hundred years ago,

      the man beneath a straw hat,

      holding the horse’s reins

      and taking a sight on the posts

      at the end of the field,

      the woman perched behind,

      above the tin potato bin,

      watching the steel disc roll along

      and fold the earth back under.

      The horse was brown as varnish

      as it pulled us forward, all

      of us, with black clay dropping

      from its shoes, and I was

      never surer of the world.

At Arby’s, at Noon

      Some of us were arriving, hungry,

      impatient, while others had eaten

      and were leaving, bidding goodbye

      to our friends, and among us

      stood a pretty young woman, blind,

      her perfect fingers interwoven

      about the top of her cane,

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