The two men sat roasting in their blue suits

on the edge of a mustard field.

Lucien Cardin, a local painter,

had suggested a portrait.

President and Vice President of the bank branch,

maybe it would hang in the lobby

inspiring confidence. It might even

cast a little grace and dignity

on the citizens of their hamlet.

They were serious men with sober thoughts

about an unstable world.

The elder, Gilbert, smoked his pipe

and gazed through his wire-rims beyond the painter.

The sky was eggshell blue,

and Lucien knew what he was doing

when he begged their pardon

and went to fetch two straw hats.

They were farmer’s hats, for working in the sun.

Gilbert and Tom agreed to wear them

to staunch their perspiration,

but they knew too the incongruity

their appearance now suggested.

And, as for the lobby of their bank,

solidarity with the farmers, their costumers.

The world might go to war – Louis flattened

Schmeling the night before – but a portrait

was painted that day in a field of mustard

outside Alexandria, Ontario,

of two men, even-tempered and level-headed,

and of what they did next there is no record.