Microaggressions

A question crept up your thigh
ran its knuckles up and down your spine
thirty-five being forty-five years down
the sinkhole of your history—you knew
you crossed a line, but you asked her age
anyway. Surprised, but apparently not
offended she answered forthrightly. What
the occasion was escapes you now
years later.

       Perhaps carrying the mixed-
race label in a society whose fecund
racism cycles and recycles
had made her tough. Tough and canny
enough to read you and know you would feel
like a dirty old man if she spoke precisely
as she did and chatted you up
for a while afterwards.

Or maybe not.
         So that when the
woman at the take-out window called you
babe, twice when she handed you
breakfast you shouldn’t eat and double
coffee; then again proffering your
receipt, you knew she had no
reason to offer you the small
endearment, except perhaps your age
and regularity at her window;
maybe too she needed some human
contact to make her day pass quicker.
It was a pleasure you treasured at seventy-five
and half the reason you liked that particular take-out place.

Now that you’ve stopped driving
ten years and three strokes later
you tick ‘stopping at the take-out window’
off a list of pleasures you’ll likely
never have again, exes
off the calendar of your days
now piling up in the boneyard back of
your mind—one thing you think it means
to be old, and you smile again at your Texan image
of old fartdom, probably plagiarized
from John Graves.

        Life in a doublewide
on some Brazos bend of the heart—live oak
outside with a partly whitewashed trunk
its roots set in a bed framed by an old tractor tire
surrounded by white painted rocks. Enough books
to keep you busy, poems to write, no matter
whether anyone reads them. “That should
do it,” you think. Where you’ll be later
you’re not quite ready to contemplate.