A family business on a busy corner, proud
To serve us all “since 1955,” three bays,
Two pumps out front, an office with chairs,
Plastic countertop Christmas tree, no begonia,
It looks cleaner than Elizabeth described it,
Although it still reeks of oil. Maybe someone
Had hurt feelings about her depiction of dirt
And tried to make an effort, scrub it up a bit.
Prints of hot rods on the Bonneville Salt Flats
Decorate most of the available wall. No one
Lives here now, for sure, but a grandson, or
More plausibly a great grandson, bearing
An eye-catching resemblance to the original
Whose ‘50s picture hangs above the register
While sporting the same damn razor haircut,
Rings up customers here to get registered
And inspected, or to get their oil changed,
Or their alternator fixed. These customers,
Their glossy black bricks of smart phones,
Their Escalades, Priuses, and Navigators,
All suggest recent twenty-first century U.S.,
But otherwise this shop is a nostalgia box.
Letting my eyes rummage around in it, I’m
Nostalgic, not for old auto shops or hot rods
Or grease monkeys or razor cuts, all props,
But for that first time I opened her book,
Twentieth century still nearly a quart short,
Or at least a fifth, the condescending poet
Herself already just recently dead, and found
It was possible to mock a little, to look down
A little on the saucy world of greasy men,
To note in a prissy way an ugly grey crochet,
And still to be in love with a scene. I knew
Right away, having come from men like them
Myself, who loved us wasn’t someone hiding
Outside of the poem, as the poet suggested.
It was the poet who softly said so loved us all.
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