Short Hearted Hank

Short-hearted Hank
broke his ankle last week.

No one in the neighborhood
stopped in to see him
though he laid up on his porch at first
with his big bound leg up on a milk crate
for everyone to see.

There were too many days this past winter
when he’d refused
to move his car to help our snowbound cars
get out of their narrow dugouts
while struggling not to slide into his bumper.
“Ya shouldn’t a parked so damn close,”
he’d bark from his warm window.

Hank’s just inside, almost out of sight right now,
his big-band music blaring
through that same window
while next door the Vietnamese guy’s eldest son
tunes up his Honda, gets that engine roaring
while his girlfriend polishes the shining rims.
When they’re done they’ll drown out Artie Shaw
with hip hop before they take off for parts unknown
as they always do, coming back long after midnight
if at all.

Hank may be the oldest resident here —
sixty-eight years in the same apartment,
says his sister who lives downstairs —
but that respect he insists none of us have for him
hasn’t been earned.  Bastard —

but I saw the Vietnamese guy
and his eldest son
cutting Hank’s hedges this morning
before the street got busy
and all of us could feel ashamed by the gesture.

Short-hearted Hank must have seen it
but I don’t know if he said a word

to the interlopers, the neighbors
who will come and go in their time
like all of us around here do:

the forms must be observed, after all.