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The Tuesday Table At the sale barn café on Tuesdays, back behind the pie, Five old men drink coffee while the cattle sell nearby. They've sat there thirty years or so, same five chairs, same spot, And settled every trouble that the rest of us have got. They know when it will rain (next week). They know what calves will bring. They know which feller in the county shouldn't run for anything. They'd straighten out the Congress, if the Congress had the sense To drive out to the sale barn and put down forty cents. This spring they buried Virgil. He was ninety, give or take. They turned his cup upside down and left it for his sake, And for a month his chair sat empty, even on the busy days, And no one in that crowded room would sit there, anyways. Last Tuesday I was paying up, and Buck caught my eye, And pushed out Virgil's chair a foot, and didn't tell me why. I sat. They poured my coffee. Nobody said a thing. I'm the young one at the table now. I'll be sixty-eight come spring. |
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Before the Interstate When I was just a button, Sixty-Six ran past our place, And I'd sit up on the gatepost with the wind all in my face And count the plates go by: Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, And once a Rhode Island, which was talk for weeks among the boys. The dust bowl families came through first, in trucks piled to the sky With mattresses and washtubs and a rocker tied up high, And kids my age in back who'd look at me and never wave, And Mama'd send a sack of biscuits out and tell me to behave. Then after the war came shiny cars in two-tone green and cream, With families bound for California, living out a dream, And they'd stop down at the station for a soda pop and ask my dad How far it was to Albuquerque, and was the road ahead that bad. Then they built the interstate just south, four lanes of hurry, and The traffic poured down onto it like water into sand. The station closed. The café closed. The motel sign went black. And the old road lay there in the sun, and nobody came back. It's still out there, patched and cracked, the center stripe worn gray. I drive it into town sometimes when I've got time to stay, And I slow down by the gatepost where a boy sat in the sun, And I count the cars the way I used to. Some days I count one. |
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Advice to a City Cousin Leave every gate the way you found it: open, shut, or wired. Don't ask a man how many cows he runs. It's not required. It's like asking what's in his bank account. He'll smile, and not say, and then He'll be polite to you forever, and you won't get asked again. Don't name the steer you're feeding out. Don't wear new boots to brand. Don't get between a cutting horse and cattle. Understand, A cowboy doesn't talk a lot, so when he does, you hush. And never, ever walk behind a mule that's in a rush. When you pass a pickup on the road, just lift one finger up Off the steering wheel. That's howdy. Don't go waving like a pup. And if somebody says it might rain, don't plan on anything. It won't. But hope's a crop out here. We plant it every spring. |