I saw a man walking down a road
in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with
block-letter packages, an M on one side,
the wind pushing him back and forward as
he struggled up to the Post Office.  I held
in my lap my diabetes diet, which my doctor told me
was a good way to lose weight, and
I saw this man walking towards me, dressed in
mismatched scrubs and a walking-jacket, packages
clutched to his chest, mouth open, sixty-eight years
of misery running down his cheeks, howling
back into the uncaring wind, one stumbling foot
in front of the next, wife gone, children far away,
alone, alone, no one to hold him
against the wind, no one to lean on, no one.

Sitting in my car, waiting to get going again,
I started to laugh, and the pain swelled up below me,
from my lungs, and twenty-two years of fear and
distrust ran down my cheeks, and I howled it
into the wind, that wind that shook the trees,
that killed the oldest maple tree on our block that morning -
that wind that shook my car as I drove back to Greensboro,
that ripped at that old man, one foot in front of the next,
screaming into that wind with all the force of a freight train
slowly rusting to pieces, long ago retired and lying, useless, in the train yard.

When I regained control, after I noticed how wet
this page had gotten, and how the man was gone
away into the Post Office or back down the street,
and how the light was green and the cars behind me
were honking and carrying on, I drove back to Greensboro.