On The Street Behind My Office - #2 - The Cart Goes Slowly

The cart goes slowly…
Carefully
Before me.
I pick my way among the tree limbs
And past storm-swollen gutters…
Through sunshine
And starlight…
Scattering dry leaves
And then along summer grass-edged sidewalks.

From the concrete cracks stare faces
And I search to recognize
Their eyes
And catch their voices…

But they are silent.

There was a time
In a high-walled Warsaw courtyard
When my barrow brimmed
With wooden toys
Bright with paint.
My grandfather carved them all.
Horses, soldiers and rifles
To fight the Prussians.
We sat together under the elms
And I watched the accurate power
As his hands formed armies.

My cart of goods
Went before me later
Down the new-found sanctuary
Of Parisian boulevards and cobbled backstreets,
My family clustered in a topmost flat
Recounting stories
Of what safety might
Feel like and sound like
And taste like
To our thirsty lips.
My grandfather’s hands
Became mine
And wood blossomed into cabinets,
Chair legs became solid,
Table tops glistening and new.

And I met my Sophie
Walking in the Trocadéro.
Ebony hair and eyes of café noir.
We stood under the canopy
And promised forever.

Then I pushed a laughing little girl
Her curls danced and her lips sang
And I tried not to see
The angry banners
That flew from doorways and flagpoles
And my little girl
On a trip that was closed to me
In a train boxcar
With a hundred small hands holding
Other small hands.

We came to the States
My Sophie and I.
And I pushed her in an invalid chair
Watching the tears
Falling into her still, thin, empty hands
As we walked and we walked.
Too late to start again.
No more laughing lips
And dancing curls.

Now I walk alone.
But I walk every day.
Sun or rain…
No matter.
When my hands find the handle
I discover
That they are all still there
When I walk
With the cart before me.


Written in April of 2005 about an older man and his daily walks along the sidewalk of the street at the back of my office building