The Broken Nose Poem by Ronald Baatz

THE BROKEN NOSE

Seems no one likes the clothes I wear.
Seems no one likes the Salvation Army.
Even Z makes fun of my clothes, and he
walks around in work clothes that are from
the hardware store where he used to work.
Although this morning, when I went to his place
for some new coffee and old conversation,
he said nothing about the ugly shirt I was wearing.
Z was consumed by the pain of a broken nose.
When he was a kid in Chicago he had had his nose
smashed in by a gang of toughs one day
while he was walking home from school.
Since then, he claims, his nose is a delicate thing.
This time it was broken when his daughter
banged her head against it. Really, I couldn't help
but laugh. He looked like a retired boxer.
This didn't seem to bother him all that much.
He said he was getting too old to be so pretty.
His days, he said, of chasing after women were over.
As he talked he kept feeling the shape of his nose.
We wondered what it might look like once
the swelling went down. I mentioned the fact
that I was actually thinking about buying a
new pair of pants, but he didn't seem to hear me.
I thought this bit of news might shock him
into thinking about something other than his nose.
We sipped our coffee. His naked daughter
kept running around the table. She opened
a cabinet door and crawled inside and sat there
licking a yogurt ball from the health food store.
She's not yet three. Every day she grows
more beautiful. She will look like her mother.
I asked Z where his wife was. He said nothing,
as he stared out the window over the kitchen sink,
as though trying to read his budding memoirs
that were hanging in the branches of cold trees
and that were being pecked at by starving birds.

1986