favorite chore

Taking out the trash: my chore again tonight.  I heave the third stretchy black bag, redolent of rot and sickly sweet, onto the chipped yellow wagon parked outside the far exit and reach for the handle. 

As I pull the squeaking cart out of its pebbled ruts and onto the walkway, I find myself awakening to the surrounding world, as though I myself am being pulled out of the pebbled ruts of my work life, loaded with the cargo that exudes the odor of a day's worth of anxieties and burdens, onto some smoother ontological plane that gently, beautifully eclipses each individual sense.  Birds fill my ears with sweet infrequent questionings over the humming backdrop of cicadas and treefrogs.  The air is warm and soft on my skin, a friendly presence.  Smoke from a nearby bonfire lends it a convivial tang, which mingles with the fragrances of growing grass and spring flowers. Above my head the constellations have been flung across the darkening sky, and they seem to gain in brilliancy with every passing moment as their backdrop deepens toward nightfall.  I walk through intensifying shadow towards the hulking dumpsters at the far end of the estate, dragging my little wagon, adding the scrape of my footsoles and the churning wagon wheels and trash stink and my own coffee breath to the lavishness that surrounds me--shedding them somehow with every step I take.

This particular night I am thinking about all the times I have taken out the trash over the years, and how charmed those forays so often have been--as this foray is, tonight.  The break they have afforded me from other labor, the sometimes shocking refreshment of slipping outside and remembering that the world is still there waiting, no matter how stultified and stagnant my day has felt up until then.  These brief journeys have been, so many times, the cool hand of God on my burning forehead. 

I fling the dumpster lid open and hoist the heavy bags into its black maw, pause before I close the lid again to watch the headlights illumine the street several yards away, revelling in my invisibility.  Then I take again the handle of my emptied yellow wagon and retrace my steps, down the drive, through the cast iron gate and the little path in the hedge, back onto the pebbled parking space, to a crooked halt.  Usually by this point my own heart feels relieved of the waste that had accumulated over the course of the day, stilled and receptive. 

I pull open the door and return to work. 

It Happened Overnight

Stranded in Minneapolis during the collapse of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, December 11, 2010

 Trapped in the airport far from home
I watch the scene from every screen.
Less than a week of falling fluff
(soft noiseless stuff) had felled the dome.
 At first, beneath the weighty drift
a telling swell, snow dusting light.
Then the sudden give and cave,
the drift a drop of driving white--
the air ashake.  And I, awake.

All that night I cannot sleep.
Over the arena of my heart
thoughts of you fall thick and deep.