Milk Bottles

from Field Stones
by Robert Kinsley

Before I was born, my father bought his neighbor's farm
but let the neighbors stay on, Al and Gertrude
old even then, older when I was young.
Who would always respond when asked how they were
with sick abed across two chairs.

What could we make of that--
two twigs in the wind, bent
in old age in desperate directions:
she in her money hid deep in her room,
he in his smoking and smoking, becoming thin of heart.

On grocery days my mother would always offer
and she, I could use a quart of milk dear,
would wander off checking of course to see,
that he wasn't looking. And he, Yes
a quart of milk too, as he stirred the small coins
in his hand, offering them like a gift,
the way he must have offered himself to her,
and she to him in those years of children now grown
and gone, intimacy unsealed forever like the empties
which they would ask be returned each week,
hers alone on the kitchen table, his
on the very far side of the room.