2007/barber

Hair today …you say
in your corny way,
rushing out to your barber.
He’s been cutting your hair
for twenty years,
we’ve just determined.
I admire your continuity,
having little or none myself,
even though I keep trying to get
you to find someone new
to cut your hair.
Every Thursday for twenty years
you’ve lunched with the same men.
Mondays it’s football, in season.
You have your repetitions,
your rhythms.
I don’t, although I try to.
I’ve never been able to hold
on to things.
Friends leave town, jobs end,
money runs out.

I ask too much of things I guess,
and so have nothing.
You ask for nothing
and piece together
from this and that.
It’s what we’re supposed to do,
I know, and I have tried.
But when I try to cobble
things together
the first one slips away
before I find the second.
Or I give up waiting.
I’ve seen this happen
so many times,
people who toughed it out
in places I found repugnant
and ended up with something
I wish I had.
It’s something I never learned
and have no natural talent for.
No genetic predisposition,
like the gypsy side of the family
despite my good intentions,
my father’s people who wandered,
instead of my mother’s
who stayed on their land.

1/24/07