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.

The Weight of Words

The pen is cheap. The desk is real. I am not writing to be remembered — I gave that up the year I gave up the other thing. I am writing because the room is quiet and someone has to stay awake. A child laughs two houses over. A door, somewhere, clicks shut behind a person I used to know. I cannot tell which of these is happening now and which I am only allowed to keep. The page does not care. The ink does not care. This is the part they don’t tell you — how much of it goes on without you. And still my hand keeps moving across the small lit square of the table like a man walking out to feed the animals in a snow he can no longer feel. When I stop, I stop. The dark will have what it always had. But the dog, patient at the door, will still be standing there — and that is what I meant by God.

Untitled (Haiku)

after the battle
fields of mustard flowers bloom
deserters return

The Moonshiner’s Last Breath

The copper has been in the family
longer than most of the family,
which, when you think about it,
says something about both.

He works at night,
not for any romantic reason
but because that is when the smell
travels least,
and because the law here
sleeps deeply,
having concluded long ago
that no one important
is watching.

The fireflies, if you must know,
are not magical.
They are insects with a chemistry problem.
But they keep him company,
and he has come to expect them,
which is a kind of love
he would never call love
out loud.

The mash sighs in the pot.
The condenser ticks.
He moves without thinking,
having done this ten thousand times,
and thinks instead
about other matters,
his brother who died young,
his daughter who married
and stopped writing,
the dog he had to put down
last April
who had been better company
than most people.

At some point he sits
on the dock he built
or his father built
or his father’s father built,
nobody alive remembers,
and lets his feet hang
above water
that has been moving past this spot
for longer than there has been
a country to call it part of.

He pours a little
into a jelly jar.
It tastes like burning,
and then, a half second later,
like home,
which is, when you get down to it,
also a kind of burning.

He thinks about the dead.
Not visions. Not voices.
Just the place inside himself
where they used to make a sound,
which has gone quiet
in some of them
and not in others,
and he could not tell you
why one and not the other
if you held a gun to him,
which, where he lives,
has been tried.

He does not, contrary to what poems
about men like him often suggest,
want to walk into the river.
He just wants to sit here
a little longer
with the copper humming
and the dock holding
and the jar half full,
and not yet have to face
whatever the morning
intends to require of him.

First light comes softly,
without permission,
and he stands,
and his knees say
what knees say,
and he goes inside
to a kitchen
that has been waiting for him
the entire time
without saying so.

Mistaking Myself for my Father

My father was not, as fathers go,
a teacher of things.
He didn’t show me how to fish
or change the oil
or tie any of the knots
a boy is supposed to learn
from someone.
What he gave me, mostly,
were sentences,
delivered the way other men
hand you a tool:
here, this might be useful,
or it might not.

You can smell water
from a mile off, he said once,
if you know what wet wool
and damp moss
smell like together.
I have repeated this
to myself for years
as if it were wisdom.
It might be wisdom.
It might be a thing
he said one afternoon
because the air
happened to smell like that,
and I happened to be standing there,
and I have spent the rest of my life
turning a passing remark
into a doctrine.

He didn’t teach me how to listen,
not really.
What he did was sit quietly
in a room I happened to be in,
and I, wanting something
to take from him,
took the silence
and called it a lesson,
and named him the teacher
of a course
he never knew he was offering.

Maybe that is what sons do
with fathers like ours.
We assemble them
out of the few things they said
and the many things they didn’t,
and we hand the finished man
back to ourselves
as a gift
we pretend he gave us.

Still.
When I am lost,
which I still get,
even now,
I stop walking
in the middle of wherever I am,
and I listen,
and I tell myself
he taught me this…,
the silence I am listening to
might just be my own,
finally grown
old enough
to be mistaken for his.

JOHNSTOWN’S INDEPENDENCE DAY

The flags are out again,
which is something the flags
are always doing in July,
hung from the porch rails
of houses whose paint
has been thinking, for some years now,
about coming off.

A boy I don’t know
runs past with a sparkler,
trailing a brief and brilliant signature
that does not last
the length of the block.

Down at the park,
someone’s grandmother
has set up a folding chair
in the exact spot
she has occupied
for what I would guess is forty years,
and the band is doing
its honest best with Sousa,
which is, after all,
what Sousa was written for.

The Conemaugh runs past
without comment,
the way it has run past
every Fourth
since the one nobody talks about
on the Fourth.

I think about that sometimes.
How a town learns
to celebrate
on top of what it survived,
the way you learn to walk again
after a bad year,
not pretending it didn’t happen,
just choosing
where to put the next foot.

The fireworks, when they come,
will do what fireworks do.
The children will say oh.
The dogs will hide.
A man my father’s age
will stand on his porch
with a beer
and his hand over his heart
even though no one is watching
and there is no anthem playing,
only the small
percussive prayer
of a town
saying it is still here.

And later,
when the smoke has gone
and the streets have gone quiet
in the particular way
streets go quiet
after a celebration,
the river will keep doing
what it has always done,
which is to carry
what we hand it
without telling us
what it knows.