Giants of the Midwest

I have seen them in their plaid shirts and high boots

Carrying five clattering pails at evening back from the barn,

Casting huge shadows, and have watched them in wonder

At night in the switchyards calling out to the engines

In thundering tones, waving red flares in broad arcs,

And I have seen their goat-faced young, already gigantic,

On the football fields cracking hard against one another,

Lost in their November breath, and have also studied

The old ones, obese on back stoops, their swayback homes

Left like great mastodons on the prairie. Grandfather,

With his momentous limp and furuncled nose,

With his sure eye for the legs of horses and women,

Once walked among them, a colossus of the Depression

Who grew large knocking door-to-door across the Midwest

For any available work, including hauling of offal,

Septic dredging, and other positions involving manure.

He subsisted, in those lean years, mainly on the shock

He felt when his wife, like the market, was seized

By contractions and shortly thereafter collapsed.

At last, several days before turning sixty,

He abandoned his legendary past

For the culverts and curbs of Maxwell Street, there

Overcoming his lifelong fear of God,

Turning up dead drunk beneath a folded paper,

His bloated trunk requiring six hands to hoist it,

An outsized casket, and a grave you could get lost in.