Song For Picking Up
Every time that something falls someone is consigned to pick it up. Every time it drops and rolls into a crack, blows out the window of the car or down onto the dirty restaurant floor — a plastic bag, a paper clip, a cube of cheese from the buffet — there somebody goes, down upon their hands and knees. What age are you when you learn that? After Dante finished the Inferno, someone cleaned up all the ink and crumpled paper. After the surgeons are done with the operating room, someone makes it spic-and-span again. After World War I, the Super Bowl, a night at the ballet; after the marching feet of all humanity come the brooms and mops, the garbagemen and moms, the janitors. One day you notice them. After that, then, no more easy litter. No more towels on the hotel bathroom floor. You bend over for even tiny bits of paper, or, bitterly, you look back at your life — like Cain upon the body of his brother.
Dark
The toilet clogs, and a man takes up the plunger and the snake and tackles it. He moves the plunger up and down, as if he was plunging his woman, or himself. He feeds the snake into the hole and rotates it. Elbow grease, foul air, the diagnostic phrase rubber gasket disintegration. He likes this job because no one else would want it, because a man feels comfortable with shit. He goes at it in the same way that he does his life, unable to tell exactly what is going on down there in the interior, banging his head against the outside, forcefully, yet happy with the work, knowing that in some sense it suits him perfectly — his willingness to sweat, his stubbornness, his freedom from the need to understand. Good man. Good man. Good man.
