The punched tin roof—and rarer, walls
Are still here in this little place,
Though clean and well-dusted now,
With paint lines crisp and neat,
For Bill is long-gone,
And his daughter runs the place.
A woman’s touch makes the place
More soft
Though perhaps… ironically,
Less inviting.
The man for whom the place is named is dead.
I sit where I sat 37 years ago.
This was my place.
Not the restaurant alone, but the town.
Then I would order a bacon cheeseburger with soft fries
$3.29
As I rushed from practice to rehearsal
Being made, not maker
But being made
To be a maker.
The chandeliers that match the tin,
Though whale oil is now anti-elegant,
Are filled with bulbs of white and orange glow.
Analog and digital clash,
For the German accents at the counter,
Surprising even in my youth,
Bespeak a frugality that would find it uncouth
To toss offending incandescence because times change.
Only as they flicker out
(I note that one needs to be replaced)
Will the warm glow of inefficient prodigality
Be supplanted by tyrannically white LED light,
To make my book glow blue and green.
The flag that hangs across the street
Speaks of the changing discourse here
Upon the street and in the fray
Though here, behind the window pane
We linger for a morning
Amid the virtues and sins
Of tobacco-stained fingers
And reserved composure,
Measured impulse
That takes—or took—time to elaborately
Decorate walls and ceiling.
Once a native, I visit now
An activist in dark array
Perhaps in sympathy—or not
The cook and server do not say,
But while I go to battle on the morrow,
I know that absent the strange face
The other faces will gather
As they have since my youth.
Though they have changed, they have not.
Though Bill is long gone
His name lingers on,
His domain ruled by women
Who hate him not
But still
Run the place differently
Though much is preserved.
On the wall in the far corner
A man from my youth prays
He at his table and I at mine.
I remember his face from the dining room
Of a friend
Whose family was profane
But had hung the print my mother never would have.
Strange that his austere folded hands and bowed head should call to mind
My mother’s sermons
An exposition of Donahue, the tenth chapter,
A reading from Friedan,
The raging liturgies of my childhood.
The verities of that time anathema now
Traded for a thing less or more sure.
I ponder whether my friends were better in their hypocrisy
Than we were in our integrity,
For they still had the memory of…
What was his name’ “our daily bread?”
…no, “Grace”
There in their dining room,
Here at Bill’s?
In my late-life cause?
Across the street, behind the vibrant flag?
Is it true, as a friend regularly reminds me,
“All is grace?”
I, like Thomas, cannot quite see it,
But it is a thing
Devoutly to be wished
Like changeful faces
And greasy potatoes
At the rise of the morning star.