By John Ziegler
The rag man, in his broken shoes
pushes his cart along the brick street,
calls out with chafed voice,
“Papers, magazines, rags.”.
All afternoon the air is still and pale,
the yellow leaves pasted to the wet street.
Near dusk, Schmoyer’s farm truck
clanks onto Franklin Street,
loaded with cabbages, and carrots,
potatoes with the mud still on.
The old women gather, make piles
on the wooden truck bed.
He places the vegetables into brown bags
with his broad hands,
the tips of his thumbs split at the nails.
My mother always called him Schmoyer.
I never knew his first name.
Leonard the egg man, with his poor toupee
parks his black wagon half on the sidewalk.
Sadie Bauer in her dead husband’s trousers,
soiled with coal dust and bacon grease
loads her splint basket with brown eggs.
Schmoyer hands me a big red apple.
Heavy rain from the west
will soon gush in the gutters,
wash black ants from the bowed heads
of the white peonies.
John Ziegler is a poet and painter, gardener and traveler, originally from Pennsylvania, he recently migrated to a mountain village in Northern Arizona.
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