Читать книгу Kindest Regards - Ted Kooser - Страница 30

In January, 1962

With his hat on the table before him,

my grandfather waited until it was time

to go to my grandmother’s funeral.

Beyond the window, his eighty-eighth winter

lay white in its furrows. The little creek

that cut through his cornfield was frozen.

Past the creek and the broken, brown stubble,

on a hill that thirty years before

he’d given the town, a green tent flapped

under the cedars. Throughout the day before,

he’d stayed there by the window watching

the blue woodsmoke from the thawing-barrels

catch in the bitter wind and vanish,

and had seen, so small in the distance,

a man breaking the earth with a pick.

I suppose he could feel that faraway work

in his hands — the steel-smooth, cold oak handle;

the thick, dull shock at the wrists —

for the following morning, as we waited there,

it was as if it hurt him to move them,

those hard old hands that lay curled and still

near the soft gray felt hat on the table.