Shops
Two men sit up at the counter
in the little noodle shop.
They are, no doubt, both friends
of the proprietor, or have become so in they days on end
they nuzzled bowls of steam and waited for the want of other
custom to amount to palpable abandonment. A woman with a
box of vegetables potters in and out of that skewed doorway,
custom made for screwed-up forms like hers, if for no
customers, as she and they
grow shrivelled, twice a day, with negligible
evidence of trade. I do not believe anybody comes
to buy things from such tiny stores as these.
The bicycle man tirelessly dismantling, cleaning, greasing,
reassembling, ultimately tyre-ing once again; in sum,
recycling, has no other object but to seem
to solve the puzzles of their parts, and then to manifest
that wisdom in the quiet scorn his eyes have for pedestrian
passers-by, and subsequently stand them in this morning sun to
gleam.