Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California. In 1952 his grandparents immigrated from Mexico during the Great Depression and found jobs as farm laborers. The subjects of many of his poems are the members of the California Chicano community, whose hard lives and dignity amid poverty and often desperate circumstances are portrayed with spare diction and exact images, and without sentimentality. Soto is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written a book of prose recollections, Living Up the Street (1984).
HOW THINGS WORK
by Gary Soto
(1985)
Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother's violin.
We're completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go
Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.
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