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.

       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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

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