SMALL TOWN HEROES

The man who runs the sports goods store

that also sells old unopened books and

board games in faded boxes, sits with his

tattooed arms folded in the sun.

He drinks a lot of beer and doesn't ask

stupid questions. His friends loiter

around small music shops all morning,

in slippers, with their shirt-tails out.

The distant air lights up the furrowed edges

of the hills. Sometimes he wants to describe

the smells of brown oaks ageing in the sun

and bakeries where boys in dirty aprons

lit their ovens in the early summer morning.

But the tattooed man dozes on when

his friends talk and the sun whitens the spines

of pale detective novels and books full of

blond-bodied girls and knitting patterns.

When a man is killed in the afternoon,

knifed and left to die with his face down

in a drain, the tattooed fellow has an opinion.

But he shuts his door and sleeps on a wooden

plank behind the counter that smells of cigarettes

and stale tea, till rain cools the streets. All the

furthest sounds of the city wake him up

slowly till he hears the rain on his own window

and thinks of the dirty water running below

the dead man's face.

In the evening when the rain lets up for a bit

his friends might return and joke about it.

He switches on the lights, at five. People drift

in with damp trouser-cuffs and notice the chinese

dragons on his arms: They talk and again the cool

air outlines each noisy car and softened tree.

It's Saturday. He rest his elbows on the cracked

glass counter and watches a girl across the street

scrubbing a couple of neat stone steps till they

gleam in:the clear blue evening.