The Gift
Pour me another I heard the man mumble
across the bar toward Matt with the bottle
ready at hand. Matt knew the fellow
too well. No unusual night,
a Monday, and all of the football
crowd had risen, paid and gone out.
Now it was Matt, myself, and the white-headed
loner about to start on his fourth
Johnnie Walker. He was big red and wrinkled.
It was known he walked and wouldn’t be
getting behind a wheel. There wasn’t
a wife. What would it matter, another
dose? But a wince went over
the bartender’s face, a worried wonder—
what if the drinker went out and stumbled,
crashed against the cement, fractured
a rib, and the broken end punctured
the drunkard’s lung? There on the pavement
blood would invisibly fill the space
in his chest meant for accepting
the breath. There, in the dark
by himself he just might asphyxiate
and we wouldn’t know till maybe the next
night when he didn’t show. What if
the codger wove wide off the sidewalk
into the street and got hit by a kid
coming hard round a corner like kids did
in their hormonal fervor? There’d be the lug
all busted up on the asphalt unable
to move a limb. And whose fault
would it be? I thought I saw all this
cross like a cloud over Matt’s broad brow,
his full cheeks and lips like a landscape
changed by the changing light, as he lifted
the golden bottle in one hand and grasped
the tumbler in the other. Out flowed the gift.
Jed Myers lives in Seattle. He is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award) and two chapbooks. Recent honors include the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, and the McLellan Poetry Prize (UK). Recent poems can be found in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The Greensboro Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Shining Rock Poetry Anthology, Magma, Canary, and elsewhere. He is Poetry Editor for the journal Bracken.