Local man is eating lunch in his car and reading the newspaper
when a guy with a gun jumps in and says okay, start her up,
and off they go to one bank drive-thru after another,

the guy putting his handgun to the driver’s temple
and counting down from ten as the man pleads with the tellers
to hand over the money. At one point, the gunman trips up

on the number six, so the driver says you miscounted
and the gunman says what and the driver says
you miscounted, so the gunman starts over again.

What was the driver thinking during the silent times,
the stretches when the two men were going
from one bank to another, stopping at the red lights,

keeping an eye out for cops? Maybe he thought that life
will break you, as Louise Erdrich says, and when it does,
you should sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples

as they fall around you, wasting their sweetness,
or maybe he remembered years earlier when he saw
a car flip and land so hard that no one inside

could have survived, and in that instant he knew
that someone had died before the person who loved them most
knew: the wife chopping a salad in the kitchen,

the husband wondering why his wife is late at work.
The gunman who miscounted finally succumbed
to drugs or mental illness or fatigue or all three

and staggered into a field and was picked up
by the officers who’d been trailing him.
Now the driver is spending his days doing

the things you or I might do and remembering that
he’d managed to add a handful of seconds to his time
on this earth, enough to taste, what, one more apple?

Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time—
they were never on time. Hitler didn’t invent
the autobahn, either; it was already there when
he took office. And the bowmen of Agincourt
didn’t appear at the Battle of Mons on August 23, 1914
to win the day for the heavily outnumbered British.

Officer after officer said they saw them, though,
saw “a long line of shapes, with a shining about them”
raining thousands of arrows upon the enemy.
Afterward, the German general staff insisted their troops
were not defeated by phantom archers but by Turpinite,
a nerve gas developed by chemist Eugène Turpin

that was delivered by artillery shells and tested
prior to the battle on a herd of 400 sheep.
Catherine the Great died of illness. She wasn’t crushed
by the weight of a horse she was trying to mate with.
That was a rumor started by the French, who were jealous
of her power and, in the sex department, have a lot

to answer for themselves. 17% of Americans think
Joan of Arc is Noah’s wife. Turpin himself was present
at the Turpinite test and said afterward that there was
just a faint odor of methylated spirit in the air
and that the subjects of his experiment were to a sheep
unharmed and “seemed only, perhaps, a little more gay.”

No one will remember you if you say there’s no such thing
as a magical nerve gas or that there was no miracle
that day on the battlefield. If you say milk is good
for you or that we should love our mothers, your listener
will turn back to the buffet table or suddenly remember
an important appointment elsewhere. Another observer

of the Turpinite test reported that, after the smoke cleared,
“of the 400 sheep, 400 were dead," frozen in place
with the grass hanging from their mouths. That account
appeared in all the newspapers. And more than one
British officer told how the corpses of German soldiers
had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds.

There’s something a little off about the young woman
behind the counter at the diner on Charles Street where
Ed and I are just now sitting down at the end of a long day, an air
of preoccupation, you might say, a look on her face that says

she’s really not here even though she is, is ready to take our orders
even though she’s holding neither pad nor pencil but instead
rests her hands on her hips and looks at us for a moment but then
past us to the door we came in through, at night falling

in Baltimore, and when she looks out, we look out,
which is when I remember saying to Ed on our way over
There’re not many people out tonight and him saying I know,
it’s like they’re all someplace else—what’s going on, you think?

A half hour earlier, we’d said goodbye to the actors who’d finished
yet another ten-hour day of rehearsals for a play that begins
with a violent shipwreck and a character who asks what country
she’s in, and when someone tells her it is Illyria, she says

And what should I do in Illyria? The woman is still looking out
the door, and sure enough, there’s nobody out there,
just the emptiness of the night, and then a figure in the distance
that moves and stops and slowly gets close enough for me to see

that it’s the old woman who’s always out walking the dog
that’s older than she is and who once shook her fist
at me and said, How about a punch in the mouth, Joe College,
and then even they disappear, and we turn back to the counter

and the woman behind it, and Ed says Let me have
a chicken salad on rye toast, no pickle, and a milkshake,
and I say, I’ll make it easy on you—I’ll have the same,
and the woman turns and puts four slices of bread

in the toaster, and just then the little radio on the shelf
over the grill crackles and a voice says, We interrupt
this broadcast again to say that Dr. Martin Luther King
was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee,

and Ed puts his head in his hands, and I don’t know what
to say to the woman behind the counter, so I say nothing.
Somewhere on the other side of the door we came in through
is a woman who could be this one’s mother, someone

who has waited her whole life to vote but can’t, and with her
is a white friend who was bloodied for marching at her side,
a little boy who needed meals and help with his homework
but got a bullet instead, an officer shot dead in the line of duty.

The newscast is over, and a song begins on the radio;
it is “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding,
himself dead a year earlier. Our food arrives. It’s pitch black outside.
The streets are empty. Where are we, I wonder, what country.