[Passing the shop after school...]
Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign
and go on, glad that his own life had to do with books.
Now at night when he saw the grey in his parents’ hair and
heard their talk of that day’s worries and the next:
lack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of
goods, if there were workers and goods, lack of orders
again,
for the tenth time he said, “I’m going in with you: there’s more
money in business.”
His father answered, “Since when do you care about money?
You don’t know what kind of a life you’re going into—
but you have always had your own way.”
He went out selling: in the morning he read the Arrival of
Buyers in The Times; he packed half a dozen samples into
a box and went from office to office.
Others like himself, sometimes a crowd, were waiting to thrust
their cards through a partition opening.
When he ate, vexations were forgotten for a while. A quarter
past eleven was the time to go down the steps to Holz’s
lunch counter.
He would mount one of the stools. The food, steaming
fragrance, just brought from the kitchen, would be
dumped into the trays of the steam-table.
Hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, onions and gravy, or a
knackwurst and sauerkraut; after that, a pudding with a
square of sugar and butter sliding from the top and red
fruit juice dripping over the saucer.
He was growing fat.
Copyright Credit: A Fourth Group of Verse, Section 33: “Passing the shop after school” from The Poems of Charles Reznikoff by Charles Reznikoff, Edited by Seamus Cooney. Repreinted by permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright 2005 by Charles Reznikoff.
Source: Poems 1918-1975: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff (Black Sparrow Press, 1977)