Counting Tips – John Gilgun

My mother came home from work,
sat down at the kitchen table
and counted her tips, nickel by nickel,
quarter by quarter, dime by dime.
I sat across from her reading Yeats.
No moonlight graced our window
and it wasn’t Pre-Raphaelite pallor
that bleached my mother’s cheeks.
I’ve never been able to forget
the moment she said–
interrupting The Lake Isle of Innisfree—
“I told him to go to hell.”
A Back Bay businessman
had held back the tip, asking,
“How much do you think you’re worth?”
And she’d said, “You can go to hell!”
All evening at the Winthrop Room she fed
stockbrokers, politicians, mafioso capos.
I was eighteen, a commuter student at BU,
riding the MTA to classes every day
and she was forty-one in her frilly cap,
pink uniform, and white waitress shoes.
“He just laughed but his wife was there
and she complained and the boss fired me.”
Later, after a highball, she cried
and asked me not to tell my father
(at least not yet) and Ben Franklin
stared up from his quarter,
looking as if he thought she deserved it,
and Roosevelt, from his dime, reminded her
that she was twenty years shy of Social Security.
But the buffalo on the nickel, he–
he seemed to understand.
_______________________

John Gilgun is the author of Everything That Has Been Shall Be Again: The Reincarnation Fables of John Gilgun (Bieler Press, 1981), Music I Never Dreamed Of (Amethyst, 1989), The Dooley Poems (Robin Price, 1991), From the Inside Out (Three Phase, 1991), Your Buddy Misses You (Three Phase, 1995), and, with Warren Norgaard, There Is A Tomorrow: A Collection of Dialogues in Prose and Poetry (FIERCE Concepts Publications, 2007).

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