Meditações - The wall clock's black, hitchy hands

Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone

Brachest, she called it, gentling grease

over blanching yolks with an expertise

honed from three decades of dawns

at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine,

where even the oldest in the old men's booth

swore as if it were scripture truth

they'd never had a breakfast better,

rapping a glass sharply to get her

attention when it went sorrowing

so far into some simple thing—

the jangly door or a crusted pan,

the wall clock's black, hitchy hands—

that she would startle, blink, then grin

as if discovering them all again.

Who remembers now when one died

the space that he had occupied

went unfilled for a day, then two, three,

until she unceremoniously

plunked plates down in the wrong places

and stared their wronged faces

back to banter she could hardly follow.

Unmarried, childless, homely, "slow,"

she knew coffee cut with chamomile

kept the grocer Paul's ulcer cool,

yarrow in gravy eased the islands

of lesions in Larry Borwick's hands,

and when some nightlong nameless urgency

sent him seeking human company

Brother Tom needed hash browns with cheese.

She knew to nod at the litany of cities

the big-rig long-haulers bragged her past,

to laugh when the hunters asked

if she'd pray for them or for the quail

they went laughing off to kill,

and then—envisioning one

rising so fast it seemed the sun

tugged at it—to do exactly that.

Who remembers where they all sat:

crook-backed builders, drought-faced farmers,

VF'ers muttering through their wars,

night-shift roughnecks so caked in black

it seemed they made their way back

every morning from the dead.

Who remembers one word they said?

The Longhorn Diner's long torn down,

the gin and feedlots gone, the town

itself now nothing but a name

at which some bored boy has taken aim,

every letter light-pierced and partial.

Sister, Aunt Sissy, Bera Thrailkill,

I picture you one dime-bright dawn

grown even brighter now for being gone

bustling amid the formica and chrome

of that small house we both called home

during the spring that was your last.

All stories stop: once more you're lost

in something I can merely see:

steam spiriting out of black  coffee,

the scorched pores of toast, a bowl

of apple butter like edible soil,

bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass,

my plate's gleaming, teeming emptiness.

Christian Wiman