Barber

Learn from the man who spends much of his life speaking To the back of your head knowing what it means to follow The razor’s edge along a worn strop or random thoughts As they spring so invisibly from the mind to a mouth Who shouldered soldiers in two wars and fled fire fields Undecorated who fathered once but was fatherless forever And who works his sentiments in deeper into your scalp Under a sign on the knotty-pine walls whose rubric reads quot homines, tot sententiae which means he sees In you his suffering smells of horehound tonics and gels Pillow heads and powders and a floor full of snippings Swept neatly every evening into a pile for the field mice All those roundabout hours only a man who fixes his tie To clip crabgrass crowding a lady’s grave could believe With a certain clean devotion and who would never for one Moment dream of hurting you when your back was turned