Sometimes, one line or one image in an otherwise unremarkable poem grabs you and stays with you for a long time. It is so for me with Thomas Lux’s offering — the final lines resonate, and I wish, though I know I am not, that I was the sort of man of whom such things were said.
The Milkman and His Son
For a year he’d collect
the milk bottles—those cracked,
chipped, or with the label’s blue
scene of a farm
fading. In winter
they’d load the boxes on a sled
and drag them to the dump
which was lovely then: a white sheet
drawn up, like a joke, over
the face of a sleeper.
As they lob the bottles in
the son begs a trick
and the milkman obliges: tossing
one bottle in a high arc
he shatters it in mid-air
with another. One thousand
astonished splints of glass
falling . . . Again
and again, and damned
if that milkman,
that easy slinger
on the dump’s edge (as the drifted
junk tips its hats
of snow) damned if he didn’t
hit almost half! Not bad.
Along with gentleness,
and the sane bewilderment
of understanding nothing cruel,
it was a thing he did best.
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