Very Delicatesse
A liver-spotted gentleman
Is preferable to younger, when
The latter thinks himself too suave
To say a simple ‘Mazeltov’
Or serve you brisket with a pickle;
Such young bucks are cheap and fickle.
I prefer the well-worn style
That does a mitzvah with a smile
We two, when we were very small,
Walked hand in hand down avenues
Studded with poplars and long views
Of granite pavement, pale and tall
Sun-sprinkled shops, apartments set
Above them on whose balconies
Perched men like birds among the trees,
Eyeing our youth with vague regret—
How could we know, young as we were,
The brevity of these our strolls,
How every hour more swiftly tolls
Than the preceding? To be sure,
The marvel of our living lies
In sensing little of the thought
That what short summertime we’ve got
Measures in spans like butterflies’,
And realizing late in age
On balconies, as children pass,
Our tenure’s brief as leaves, as grass,
As words washed from the novel’s page
By tears dropped silently, this truth
Too hard to tell to little ones
Passing in hand-held joy, the sun’s
Brief rays alighting on their youth.
That which is seen by the untrained eye of the casual observer is an older man, an elderly man, perhaps a shell of his former self. Not someone with a lot of use and life adventure left in him. Handsome, perhaps, in his latter years, with this silver hair and these pale clear eyes, with his faintly stooping posture before a window where no single thing that’s new is seen; elegant in his quiet way, and maybe wise. But not more.
What cannot be seen is the forty-two years he spent working for the postal service, learning the business from the bottom up and eventually teaching not just the next generation that would follow him but the next after that as well. There is no way to know at merely a glance that he tended a beautiful garden on Sunday afternoons where he grew too many vegetables for his own table so he shared the rest around the neighborhood. Invisible, too, is the love he keeps alive for his long-dead wife of thirty years, except for the small bouquet of flowers he picks from that garden of his and gives to their son and his wife every Monday because they were her favorite blooms. Yes, the flowers and the kids.
In the plain little vase where those flowers live for the week, there is room for all that can’t be seen in one quick look at the profile of a man who sits and meditates beside a window. Only by taking the time to appreciate the fulness of that humble bunch of flowers and all that they have to tell can anyone really know what to see when looking toward that window’s light. It takes a certain clarity to see what’s right in front of you.
Art-Colored Glasses 