YARD SALE CHAIR
There’s not a yard sale
I can just drive past.
At this one, I’m hooked
by an easy chair: $3.
What, I ask, is wrong with it?
The woman shrugs, half
caveat, half come-on,
so I sit and test it out.
My God, I could rest
weary bones forever.
Only later, do I smell it:
like a horse
that’s pulled a junk wagon
the length of America.
Still, my wife observes
after she’s sighed, content
as a woman awakened by a kiss,
the covers can be cleaned.
I ease myself into it again,
wonder when it’ll crack,
collapse like an exhausted camel,
or if moths in the thousands
will flutter from a tear
in the fabric: an orange lurid
as a high school team jacket.
But Lord, it’s comfortable,
books more enjoyable
while I’m curled in it:
a kindly grandfather
with a soothing voice
and more stories
than the Arabian Nights.
—from Rattle #7, Summer 1997
__________
Born and raised on the not so mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, Robert Cooperman now calls Denver home, where he has turned his love of the Old West into a cottage industry of poetry collections about the Colorado Territory and other aspects of frontier life.
