-the soda-jerk at the drug store-

I know of a soda fountain

at the Oak Grove Pharmacy on the corner
of Bedford Street and Oak Grove Avenue.

there, you can order hot

fudge sundays, banana splits,

malts and lime-rickeys.

when the pills are ready, the pharmacist

will call out the name of the prescribed.

the soda-jerk is an older kid we know.

out the window is the street where we live.

the girl who makes me pant lives in the grey

three-tenement with a ringer washing machine
squatting on the first-floor porch.

out the big paned window, people are walking by.
men with soft hats banned at their brims.
women with purses tucked neatly into their armpits.

the cars parked on the street look heavy,
dressed in bulky sheetmetal, fenders like dirigibles. 

new-styled panoramic windshields distort the landscape.

the Hugo A. Dubuque School is straight up the avenue
beyond the cemetery where Lizzie Borden rests.
inside the drug store, the music is played
by portable radios lying on their backs on the counter.
the music is convincing, although most of it
seems to circulate inside the walls of the portables
where only some of it finds a way out.
what we heard was enough.

my older sister is with me and our younger brother.

the pills are for my grandfather,

my mother’s father who has sugar diabetes.

I saw a black growth on the side of the little

toe of his left foot one night as his wife, my grandmother,

my mother’s mother, soaked and patted his feet in a shallow
basin on the floor of the parlor in front of the television.

later in the month his foot was amputated in Boston.

later in the year his sight began to fail and he died soon after.
I thought he'd be buried in the backyard
near his grapevine with the cats and parakeets
but they packed him off to the funeral home
just beyond the bakery.

but before that, my sister, brother and me are sitting
at the counter of the soda fountain, the soda-jerk,
an older kid we know is serving his paying customers
and we’re just waiting there, spinning, always clockwise,
for our grandfather's pills.

                                               Quequechan, 1951, 1952