PENNIES

 

I'm going to miss them when they go,
as they inevitably will, those impractical
remnants of the past, smallest
of small change that we, as kids, placed on the sun-warmed railroad tracks, waiting for the weight of a Burlington Northern
to wipe their words and images clean.
I'll miss the glass jugs and Ball jars
filled with them, soapy light slanting through the kitchen window
sparking each of them in a different way.
I'll miss their jangle and their coppery smell, and how they could make a kid feel rich waiting to cash them in at the bank,
to be counted and rolled like cigars.
Most of all, I will miss their random promise of luck,
how a moment, a mood, a day
could turn on such a small object,
dropped or tossed along the sidewalk,
waiting to be reclaimed, waiting to reveal, to you alone, its secret worth.

DREAMING OF OLD JOBS

 

We still dream of those old jobs, the ones leading only to the next shift, the next break, the next paycheck and day off, to rest and to worry, and start it all over again. Those jobs that we gave so many years to follow us like ghosts, tracking us down in our anxious sleep, as if we had left one detail or another unfinished, forgot to lock up or turn the thermostat down. The waitress balances her tray of trembling water glasses two decades after she has retired, a cacophony of voices still calling out their orders. The bus driver turns his oversized wheel onto a street with neither a name nor discernable stops. Your mother still packs shells at the munitions plant ten hours a day, and your brother tears sheets of steel from the shearing machine into eternity, tiny stars of metal glinting beneath his skin. While you stand on the loading dock of a crumbling factory, ringing the service bell again and again. It's so early the birds are not yet stirring, the winter darkness folding in around you. But you have been here long enough. If no one answers this time, you think, you'll force yourself to wake, and be gone.

GARAGE SALE

 

Someone, somewhere, has that missing arm

that snaps neatly into Barbie's shoulder;

someone can patch up those jeans, torn and frayed

by time, clean out that ancient coffee pot.

Someone needs an 8-track player in their Chevy,

a jar of random buttons, ball of rubber bands,

someone needs that painting of Jesus knocking

at the door, rays of gold light drifting out.

Someone can restring and tune that guitar.

Someone never read that book in high school,

or heard that album at the right time in their life.

Someone has looked everywhere for that,

then forgotten all about it, then looked again.

Someone has decided to take up bowling.

Someone can save that withering plant.

Someone has just the right photo -- graduation

or wedding portrait -- for that antique frame,

its tarnished brass edges pointing outward

like stars, its bed of black felt empty beneath

the dusty glass, waiting for someone to step inside,

turn on the lights, claim their rightful place.