CASEWORKERS We braced our wits with morning coffee, the lyric taste of small talk rising in our mouths, and a conspiracy of laughter spread among us. What a crazy way to make a living ... a kind of tender deceit that won't admit the truth, we said, and Tenth Street, choked with the wrecks of love, kept heaving at the door. The phones wept, and the waiting room splintered into countless desperate eyes, the work of some delirious cubist. And you: "Someday I'll move to a villa on the south coast of Spain." "It gets like this," I said. "Seeing others buckle, you wonder if the time will come when one more plea for help will send you screaming into traffic. Got a light?" "Yes," you said. "But I keep it under a basket, away from the rain." We stretched, yawned, and scratched our bellies like soldiers in a trench who are used to the war. But our frailty bled, and I clung to the absurd, the blessed folderol of salvation, and watched the tumble in the sultry dusk of sparrows (dear God) the sparrows. -- Thomas Alan ORR, "Hammers in the Fog," (1995/Restoration Press, Indianapolis, IN), copyrighted material posted by permission.