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.