Across the Street
Tree roots buckled the driveway
until weeds grew knee-high
through the twisting cracks.
Haggard men always seemed to be
lighting cigarettes with pale cupped hands.
Even in winter they wore only T-shirts,
each with a pack of Viceroys
rolled into a skin-tight sleeve
above tennis ball biceps.
They’d lean on the window of a car
that hadn’t moved for months,
the hood propped up with a two-by-four,
a half dozen greasy sparkplugs scattered underfoot.
Sometimes they’d get a car running
and we’d hear crazed whoops and hollers;
down our street they’d race, no muffler,
cigarettes glowing behind the dust-caked windshield,
a dangling metal clamp bouncing sparks
off the asphalt.
Encyclopedia
I dreamed of the day
my parents would get the money –
then the encyclopedias would come,
even if they came one volume at a time.
I’d study the Aardvark while someone
at a warehouse in Bismarck
would be putting postage
on the glossy leather bound
volume of “B” – stuff about
bees and the Battle of Little Big Horn
loaded onto a west bound truck
while “C” was being boxed up.
The “E”s would be coming soon
and I’d read up on economics
to see if it could explain the hopelessness
on the encyclopedia salesman’s face.
Week after week that summer
he looked through the screen doors
of my neighborhood
and scanned the desultory living rooms
strewn with t. v. trays,
offered a payment plan
with a free paperback dictionary.
That fall I saw him
with a Shetland pony and a camera,
selling portraits
of saddled-up toddlers with red cowboy hats
and toy pistols.