TWO POEMS

Out of Business I’d been there before, to that strip of shoeshine parlors,hole-in-the-wall clothiers, the sprawling hardware store,the Sphinx movie theatre whose marqueeadvertised some Bette Davis or Jimmy Stewart smash playing since 1944. Some were boarded upor plastered with Going Out of Business signs.Behind the counter, clerks busied themselveswith files of delinquent accounts. The office had last been refurbished in Coolidge’s day,with a varnished rolltop and torn palimpsestsof wallpaper. A short man embraced me—my father’sfather, I knew that instant, the butt of drunken glory, jobs lost after bourbon lunches, mortgages and wivesabandoned, the career promised at Carnegie Techreduced to upper rooms in a funeral home,a new wife we’d never met, nothing to show. I looked down on the old man’s thinning hairwith something like fondness. Yet that ghostcould not have been my tall and burly…