Sunday Ritual

Sunday Ritual

Because my backyard isn’t mine

but shared with neighbors never home,

I must remember to go

down Sunday nights.

It was there on the gravel drive,

returning from a rocky week,

I found the trash cans lounging,

mouths stuffed with food.

How long had this been left rotting?

Neighboring windows were always dark

on the weekends, off drinking

until morning

and if I didn’t roll these bins

the heavy walk to the curbside,

ignoring the stench and the flies,

who would take them?

Long before, I met a kind man out front

playing catch with his wife and son

and I approached to greet them.

He welcomed me to the old apartments

even as they were preparing

to move out in a few days.

It is months now that their rooms have been filled.

Cigarette butts and brown boxes

are tossed from the balcony down

near the garbage in an ungathered pile,

remnants of people moving in.

Or perhaps moving through.

That one night, I dragged both bins

and since made the trip ritual

and I remember what’s gone

and what’s here I try to forget.

The pile curls like a beggar

around the empty containers

every week, pleading with me:

who lives in the darkness next door?

The pile seems to burn beneath

the cone of the orange street lamp,

but won’t budge unless I come down

Sunday, humble Sunday.

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As I write through the month of September, most of the poems I write for the day (since I'm writing a poem per day) need more work before I'd post them on my blog, but every now and again I come across one that just enjoy. This poem could probably use plenty of work (like I think I could have a much better title). But I enjoy it even as it is. To write this poem, I stole the structure from a poem by Li-Young Lee called "Visions and Interpretations." I've always been told that good poets steal, not borrow, so I try to do that every now and again. After that, I took a couple of personal experiences and used the truth of those experience to craft the poem. I say it that way because not everything in this poem is true, but because the truth is more complicated and essentially irrelevant. For instance, I've exaggerate the trash - there was never rotting food hanging out of it. But it is true that I'm the only one who moves the bins each week. It is not true that the man and the family have moved out. The truth is they live in a building that is attached to mine and they deal with their building's garbage bins. It is also true that he did it once for our building before I arrived. Good man. Finally, it is true that there is a pile of move-in boxes around the trash containers that has been there fore weeks after the new people arrived. It irks me that they won't deal with their own recycling, so last week, Sunday evening, their lights were on and I knocked to offer my help in moving the boxes to the curb, but they never answered the door and I didn't move the boxes. I feel I should've just moved the boxes, so next recycling time I'm just going to suck it up and move the pile of boxes. And, of course, it will be a Sunday evening.