My Grandfather's Cronies

I remember them vaguely,

Anthony Canavin, Coleman Connolly, Dudley Molloy,

old men we'd meet by chance

at the bus stop downtown,

their noses purpled from cold,

hands pocketed in their overcoats.

Sometimes one pressed a dollar in my mitten

and my grandfather handed it back,

the giver rolling his blue eyes to heaven

and asking how a dollar would hurt me.

They chuckled when my grandfather gave in

then fell silent, shy, as if they remembered

a dollar meant nothing to kids like me

and how when they first arrived in Pittsburgh

they saw gold in the sooty smear of dawn.

How their mothers' hands trembled, perhaps,

over the tea things that last day in Galway

and how they wrote, sent money, made do

with chipped dishes bought from the Penn Hotel,

put a portrait of Kennedy above the TV.

How their lives at home were forgotten

by all but a few relations and each other,

retired hod carriers, bricklayers, steel workers

stomping their feet on a cold corner of the New World,

spare change jingling in their pockets like stories.