The Question
What about the people who came to my father's office
For hearing aids and glasses—chatting with him sometimes
A few extra minutes while I swept up in the back,
Addressed packages, cleaned the machines; if he was busy
I might sell them batteries, or tend to their questions:
The tall overloud old man with a tilted, ironic smirk
To cover the gaps in his hearing; a woman who hummed one
Prolonged note constantly, we called he “the hummer”—how
Could her white fat husband (he looked like Rev. Peale)
Bear hearing it day and night? And others: a coquettish old lady
In a bandeau, a European. She worked for refugees who ran
Gift shops or booths on the boardwalk in the summer;
She must have lived in winter on Social Security. One man
Always greeted my father in Masonic gestures and codes.
Why do I want them to be treated tenderly by the world, now
Long after they must have slipped from it one way or another,
While I was dawdling through school at that moment—or driving,
Reading, talking to Ellen. Why this new superfluous caring?
I want for them not to have died in awful pain, friendless.
Though many of the living are starving, I still pray for these,
Dead, mostly anonymous (but Mr. Monk, Mrs. Rose Vogel)
And barely remembered: that they had a little extra, something
For pleasure, a good meal, a book or a decent television set.
Of whom do I pray this rubbery, low-class charity? I saw
An expert today, a nun—wearing a regular skirt and blouse,
But the hood or headress navy and white around her plain
Probably Irish face, older than me by five or ten years.
The post office clerk told her he couldn't break a twenty
So she got change next door and came back to send her package.
As I came out she was driving off—with an air, it seemed to me,
Of annoying, demure good cheer, as if the reasonableness
of change, mail, cars, clothes was a pleasure in itself; veiled
And dumb like the girls I thought enjoyed the rules too much
In grade school. She might have been a grade school teacher;
But she reminded me of being there, aside from that—as a name
And person there, a Mary or John who learns that the janitor
Is Mr. Woodhouse; the principal is Mr. Ringleven; the secretary
In the office is Mrs. Apostolacus; the bus driver is Ray.
by Robert Pinsky
from New American Poets of the 90s;
David R. Godine Publisher, 1991