The Hats of Old Men

There is the man in the trilby
who has spent forty years
in the same library carrel,
turning brittle pages with the tips of his fingers,
almost finishing a novel,
his hat tipped at the angle
of someone who once intended
to be a great deal more interesting
than he turned out to be.

Down the street, under a straw boater,
a man kneels in his garden
counting tomatoes, counting beans,
the way a banker counts
when no one is looking.
He used to throw the kind of summer parties
people still talk about
when they’re trying to remember
what summer was for.

The cowboy hat is harder to write about
without sounding like a country song,
so I will only say this:
the man wearing it
no longer has the horse,
but if you watch him cross a parking lot
you will see that his hips
still know things
his hands have started to forget.

And what about the bowler,
which I always think looks slightly embarrassed
to be sitting on a head at all.
The accountant who wears it
plays cricket on Sundays
and tallies columns the rest of the week,
which is, when you think about it,
the same thing
performed in different weather.

The beret arrives last, of course,
the way painters always arrive last.
There is a small spot of cadmium red
on the left index finger
of the man underneath it,
and a longer story about Paris
that he is willing to tell
but is hoping you won’t ask for.

I could go on. The baseball cap
on the veteran at the diner counter,
the homburg on the gentleman
who still owns three suits,
the fedora someone’s father
left on a hook
when he went out one morning
in 1962
and somehow never came back
to retrieve it.
Each one a small declaration,
a way of saying
this is who I was,
or wanted to be,
or am still attempting,
balanced on the head
of a man going nowhere
in particular,
which is, I think,
where most of us are headed
most of the time.