O Garbage Men, the New Year Greets You Like the Old

• George's New Year's song, as always. I always loved George most.
• Future Sky.
• 2018: what to do about the Duh.
• I mean here. There's nothing to be done about it in the world.
• (The things I can't write about here I still can't write about here. Or there.)
• (Or...)

• When black is white.
• In search of Grace.
• Normally the gag would be to say I must be 101st, but the numbers prevent me.
• Thinking about corvids.
• I've updated the blogrolls, by which I mean I've moved the moribund to one of the Moribund cemeteries. 
• Reminder - I do this so I see you're alive when you float to top of the dead.
• The Geography of Poverty changed vendors, I think, doesn't update on blogrolls, hasn't for months, but there's new stuff there, it's worth visiting regularly. I've left it where is was in under New Here.
• A New Year's resolution.
• Thanks everyone for reading. As always, if there's someone or someplace you think I should be reading please let me know. As always, if you are Kinding me but me not you, please let me know.
• Year's End. 

    
TO THE GARBAGE COLLECTORS IN BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA, THE FIRST PICK-UP OF THE NEW YEAR

Philip Appleman
 

(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap,

    like furry mittens,

    like childhood crouching under tables)

The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black

outside our window: clattering cans, the whir

of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on ...

I see them in my warm imagination

the way I’ll see them later in the cold,

heaving the huge cans and running

(running!) to the next house on the street.

 

My vestiges of muscle stir

uneasily in their percale cocoon:

what moves those men out there, what

drives them running to the next house and the next?

Halfway back to dream, I speculate:

The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old

    Bloomington a cleaner place

    to live in—right, men? Hup, tha!”

Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys,

    let’s burn up that route today and beat those dudes

    on truck thirteen!”

Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can,

    another dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’

    three kids through Princeton?”

Or something else?

Terror?

 

A half hour later, dawn comes edging over

Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like

a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green,

and over that the black-and-blue of night

still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave

their silhouettes against the red, and through

the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk

of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men,

like windup toys, tossing little cans—

and running.

  

All day they’ll go like that, till dark again,

and all day, people fussing at their desks,

at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison

tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all

things that are Caesar’s.

 

O garbage men,

the New Year greets you like the Old;

after this first run you too may rest

in beds like great warm aproned laps

and know that people everywhere have faith:

putting from them all things of this world,

they confidently bide your second coming.