THE QUESTIONS

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 her “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 headdress 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. Apostolacos; the bus driver is Ray.