Grocery Night
       

I have seen nothing that hasn't already been
lost from its birth
so many times the avenues have a sheen—
as a car passed through a car wash glows
from happening in the now, which isn't talking
in this city of snowmen
who lose their heads
and then their torsos
and even their nakedness.
And these same doors to needs
and to these shoppers
wheeling carts around,
and almost every time the same bagger
who shall remain nameless
pushing my groceries into the backseat,
as if to push his own
existence out of his hands and shut the door,
speaks in a voice fatigued by its own formality
the words for just how tedious it is
to buy this night and many like it,
we shoppers with sacks of perishable goodness
our heads moon above
with the borrowed light
of the streetlights and the car lights
spread across our features
carved at times as out of sheer inertia.
That light is changing like the money
we try to make all day and into night
provision our lives
while our children roll another evening away
until it snowballs
to people with nothing but weather on their minds
shaped out of this snow,
still wearing handprints,
looking more and more like the mess
one life is not enough to face.
Landscape of demand and demand
and little lights of comprehension,
supply of saving graces,
the sacks of groceries in back
death cannot celebrate
and famine cannot touch,
as each engine turns over
like a sleeper and is gunned alive,
I look up from my hands on the wheel.
Behind each pair of car lights
there is a person or two, families
whole or broken,
workers all alone
warming their hands with their breath
in distances you must travel to believe,
merging with the bound—
this road, this wilderness—

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Copyright © 2011 William Olsen All rights reserved
from Sand Theory
Triquarterly Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission