At the bakery in winter the old men hold the door
(though it sticks open on the uneven floor)
for their trundling wives.
The wind is urgent and less polite and
elbows past them as if to jump the line,
which would move faster if there were labels
on the offerings of the trade –
the crullers and bear claws and streusels and strudels
(and who really knows which is which?)
How, with the wind and the winter in here
and the line pressing on,
are they to know what to say?
They have to ask
“what’s this and what’s that”
and sometimes when they’re told
it hurts a little to not know already.
They feel threatened to hear names
like Bismarck and Pershing
because those martial monikers ambush the old men
with the cold tactics of ghostly senescence.
Unable to assemble the memories
that they find, wandering
amid the booted chaff of history’s dusky fields,
they swallow unchallenged passwords
and re-feel the crippling fear
of never finding their way back
through the black percussive silence
to the rally point.
But here is a good place, the bakery in winter,
where old wives recount for the girl at the counter
stories of the latest hospital stay.
The husbands hang their leather bombers,
worn, wrinkled, and grave as their skin,
on the backs of chairs.
With the wind so urgent though
and less polite
they put their jackets back on
and think about Bismarck and Pershing
and wonder if it was enough
to have your name live on forever
if only as an unmarked good in a familiar place
that nevertheless stayed too cold in the winter.
Andy Havens 