At Arby's At Noon by Ted Kooser

 At Arby's at Noon

by Ted Kooser

Some of us were arriving, hungry

impatient, while others had eaten

and were leaving, bidding goodbye

to our friends, and among us

stood a pretty woman, blind,

her perfect fingers interwoven

about the top of her cane,

and she was bending forward,

open eyed, to find the knotted lips

of a man whose disfigured face

had been assembled out of scars

and who was leaving, hurrying off,

and though their kiss was brief

and askew and awkwardly pursed,

we all received it with a kind of

wonder, and kept it on our lips

through the afternoon.

From Kooser's 2014 collection Splitting an Order.

There's a line from another poem ("In a Gift Shop") that goes "women/like these, each helping another/ do something for someone not there."  In this example, the two women are helping one pick out a greeting card for another ("someone not there").  In the "Arby's" poem, there's a small, important interaction between the two people kissing -- and there's an additional interaction (another kind of kiss) with those who view it and take it with them.  

There are many poems that involve a couple in the collection, starting from the first, involving two men (one old wone with a cane) who are getting a car fixed, another one where the speaker interacts with two men old man and his father, in a parking garage staircase.  Another one where the speaker watches the interaction between a roller blader and an old couple with a dog (which causes a reaction in memory of the old people) and another where a single person receives "Bad News" but the other person is on the other end of the telephone line... and a third person is the subject of the bad news.  

The title bpoem