« Back to Excerpts

Every Morning

Neil Shepard 
Garbage men idle in their garbage
truck in a pull-off spot with a dawn
view. I'm up with them watching
their sweet waste waft up and bring down
the crows, who call and circle as if
over a dying beast. I'm trying
to guess their aesthetic, silly
as it sounds, wherever the sweet
spot in their bodies is, the leisure
that causes them to stop here.
Is it the mountain view, the mown pasture,
or just a place to flick butts
from the cab and ogle at the jogger
on her dawn run, the slim retiree
whose manse nearby in what used to be
south pasture is covered now in flowers.
And what's her highest pleasure?
She's at it every morning by six,
turning the compost pit, manuring
the beds, bending and straightening
her back, out there every morning
in her bikini top and running shorts,
leathery, gray-haired, lively.
Days ago I startled the guy
who parks his pickup here beside
north pasture every morning--
after the garbagemen go--
enjoying, I imagine, the morning
his way, windows down, smoking,
reading the news, smoking, taking in
the view, then back to news.
Lately, he'd turn up his radio,
country music jangling and twangling
over the hay. I knocked on his cab
and told him straight: I don't like sound-
tracks with my nature, the birds
dubbed out, the wind a syncopation
between notes of a hillbilly bass line.
Well, the guy startled--he was young
and dark--deeply tanned, black shock
of hair, well-muscled, and violent
in his face, his gruff "Excuse me
for livin!" before he choked
the ignition, stomped the gas, and spun
his tires in a spray of gravel and dust.
I felt bad but I felt right, too.
I wasn't denying him his view
but was limiting his pleasure,
the old compromise between one nature
and another, between a human song
and the wind's. Now he's on my mind
again. I wrote down his license plate--
just in case--some endangered bird
preceding the identifying numbers
that showed, I guess, he was more than
the gunrack on the back of his cab
and for everything he shot
there was something he gave back.
Now he's gone and put a hole in this
early morning as yesterday
his father found him dead, down there
in what we call the Johnson slum, a self-
inflicted gun-wound to the head.
I didn't know him but for the picture
in the morning papers. He lived
and died in a dark apartment
shaded by a fire escape, but he liked
the open air, his father told the local
news, he liked every morning
rising early, to take the morning air.
« Back to Excerpts