Poetry

I was sitting at a banquet table before the awards ceremony. 
A distinguished character actor, who narrated the PBS documentary
I saw last night, entered the banquet hall in a white jacket.

My father spoke: Look at this, he said to me. We were walking through
an alley from somewhere to somewhere else in Brooklyn. In front of us,
a man with white hair and a white beard reached into a dumpster,
plucked out a bag of potato chips, stuffed his arm up to the elbow
in the bag, let it flutter to the pavement at his feet, and shuffled ahead.

Barry was six-foot-six, fifteen like me, floating layups and hook shots
over our heads through the hoop in my driveway. We called him Big Bird
for dwarfing us, for his slappy feet, for the mouth that hung in a grin at all