Poetry

Sale

by Mary Kinzie

Older now, he is among us in diminished form,

clothes sagging, hat large on the fine head

He likes the largest stores acres of socks and tuna where

high girders look down on him also who

pushes his cart and leans on it a little

. . . something sacramental about the belittling

perspective something

heroic about the high shadows in the niches

of the corrugated roof

beneath which

under spotlights that don't spread far

he moves with the people who comb through

the aisles pulling down unwieldy

batches of single things to last them through

cold time

that can't be trusted

There he is at the far end of an avenue

of obelisks of paper

head cunningly mobile like a bird's eyes quick like one

beading on flecks that might be the

morsels that it needs

or on grains or seeds

At this its faltering morse of chirrups but no long address

only

the same few wordchains

at my feet

water water water

millet beak millet crack millet

air down danger aieeeeeeee

But in their multitudes horrific

squeals

blue golden green their throats and breasts

all with the herringbone

wingcaps that grind like blades

of a thousand ceiling fans in a

flaming house

After the teak forests were hewn down plagues

of parakeets rippled down on the crops

themselves a crop digesting

menacing

no longer charming and

observable

but like any swarm or heap or tumulus or

housing project or array of products or uncountable mass

of faces even rich ones

repellant

You can almost see them in his mind

my father's wordchains as they click against each other

rapidly succeeding in his mind

I've got to get there got to

                           bank today        to get to sleep                 to shave

                                         got not to wait

                                                    a second longer for what I've earned

                                         my whole life through the right to want

without excuse

and he thinks the people at the other end are

idiots or

when things are going well

just helpless

or when they know a little fact

that he does not

(that beating flour too fine will mean the gluten

cancels out the baking soda and the rolls

won't rise

well then that they are smart

as whips

Eyes almost black behind his glasses shining

before the freezer cases of brightly packaged

dinners with too much

sodium and fat

rounds of chicken steaming

like eager faces against the costly frost

he flies up into the highest branches

of the possible air and then goes still

at everything spread down there for sale