breaking fast

He rises, slowly, before the sun,
Before the crow,
Before the dun dust begins to stir
At the pane of his splintering,
Paint-flaking,
Breath-aching bedroom window,
As sealed as a sieve
Until he wakes it open.
Darkness doesn’t knock,
As it comes and comes often,
Because he’s taken to welcoming it in;
He pulls, again, a breakfast chair for it
In his spartan-hearted kitchen.
Not for the give-in, oh no,
But to hold a long look
And a candid conversation,
As an honest tongue might have
With a broken-handled hoe.
His weariness begs the company,
While his why of it is ever-want to know:
For the toil he puts into each
Overworked row,
Callus on blister, year on dirty tear,
Should amount to far more
Than a Mason jar so clinkless
With pinched-hard pennies
And a dollar too-dear.
Though quietly thankless,
His sweat-brow’s not thinkless,
And winces of whim swing him low
Every time the tired plough-horse whinnies.
Yet to sit so near, two plates on the wood—
To stare into what he hasn’t
While breaking fast with what he has
Isn’t to lament, though thrash he could,
Or to court the unbidden torture of it;
But to treat it as well as he’d wish to be treated
By the fortune of hope it’s hidden
So deeply within a well-meaning life
Scar-furrowed by it all.
Again and again and again
And, this still-darksome dawn, once more
He pushes back his rack-legged chair,
Hats his crown with colorless flair,
And, spurs lifted from a loose hook on the wall,
Turns every toe toward the door—
Despair, disappearingly,
Left sitting there.