Lifesaving by Gary Fincke

Lifesaving

My father, once, heard a man holler, “Baker! Baker!”
from below his bakery’s rear window where snow
had been drifting high against the wooden building.
Drunk, my father thought, recognizing the voice
of someone, just after two a.m., who often closed
one of that street’s two taverns. Twenty degrees
and windy, my father knew, might kill a fallen man
by daylight, but he waited, extending the sentence
that crier had earned for the chronic crime of being
unable to care for himself, finishing a prep of pies
before wading, ankle high, to lift and lead that man
inside to sit beside the showroom space heater,
offering the folding chair, not the armed, padded one,
its small comfort beyond what his good will could bear.

“Bob Schenk,” my father would say, naming him
at the end of each retelling. “That fellow ate
the warm hard roll I offered when I noticed him
awake after I put the coffee cakes in the oven,”
ending there as if the rest, spoken just once,
was unimportant, the chair empty when he laid,
as always, the first tray of those cakes above
the display cases for cooling, the heavy snow
muting the early morning until rescue was sent
by the city, the trucks spewing, as they did then,
ashes in both lanes, something rough and dry
for traction before the first surge of rush hour
traffic, the street, in one direction, filling despite
the icy weather, making its way to Pittsburgh.

*

Gary Fincke’s newest poetry collection, A History of When, will be published in November by Press 53. The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems was published by Press 53 in 2025.