Happy Hour

Sam’s Bar & Grille, January 1964

It’s a busy silence they maintain,

like holy brothers hounding after God.

They’ve tramped through snow in heavy boots

and will avoid the niceties of talk,

big-shouldered men who married young,

just out of school, as everybody did.

The children came and then they went,

although a few of them have now grown silvery

beside their fathers and their brothers, too.

Today they watch the flaxen sunlight

settle for an hour that means so much

if you’ve been standing on a warehouse floor

or punching holes or driving forklifts

in a timeless dull fluorescent buzz.

They come here for the bar and not the grille,

to nurse their beers in yellow rows.

Sam knows who needs a shot as well

and serves them quietly, as if unbidden,

as his nose-hairs twitch and crown bows low.

He serves, then sends them back into the world,

its winter snow-light and the crooked streets

where each of them must live forever and a day.