TRASH NIGHT

Dare you to tell the possum cravings pass.
Dare you to tell a thumb-footed marsupial that.
Dogs crave the pork bones they buried
in your lily rows. You planted them lilies
too close, the neighbor says, is it blue
bags or paper.  She’s set her evil eye
on the laid-off man who drops his dogshit
down the storm drains, noted the quivering
tails of his hounds, who stalked the zoo
wallaby down till they wore him out.
Those dogs live one block down and one
block over, yowl all day to heavy metal music.
Pour boiling H20 in your weedcracks,
even gasoline.  That’s how we always do it. 
Why waste good money on spray.  Look how white
those McCarty kids are, do they ever get outside.
Fish fry grease will wilt that creeping nightshade,
curl it up like witch feet. Why would you tolerate
all that Creeping Charlie. But don’t it smell fine
when it’s mowed.  Neighbors crave other neighbors
to pass their primordial insights to.  God rest
the zoo wallaby, cornered by Laidoff’s shelter saves,
dragging their clanking chain lightning around from one
to another place nobody wants them. How much
will they charge Laidoff for the wallaby,
harassed and harangued to death while the he-wolves
and she-wolves howled in their enclosures. 
What did the slow-pacing bobcat think
when he heard that death racket.  Bet he craved
some of that wallaby action, hey. Born
as he is to rip out throats. Only the possum
heard it all.  Only he knows, and damned
if he’s going to say.  His roof is your car’s
underbelly, his carpet your driveway gravel.
Breakfast is beetles and snails plus whatever
you threw out.  Ditto for dinner and lunch.
When you wish him a happy Trash Night he makes a face.

By late afternoon on the coldest day of the year,
he’d worked himself up to the highest peak,
stripping black shingles pitched to fall over the porch

in moldy patches, the way sky would soon fall,
Old Testament sky, shot with red arrows into starry
indigo.  Now he had even cast of the tie

that bound him to our house, new father who’d named
his new daughter after the white rapper’s daughter,
young roofer with most at stake; and now

he was straddling the roof peak in silhouette,
tufty blonde hair gelled into chunks, square block
of his jaw, cigarette held in the vice of his lips,

grimace of concentration.  He wanted the job done,
wanted his money.  This morning he’d been
the first to arrive in blue darkness, below zero wind chill,

holey gloves; frayed scarf tied under the violet rings
of bruises around his eyes, a jammed-on cap.  Hopping
side to side lightly to warm himself along little rises

of snow in blue streetlight, refusing the thermos of coffee
until insisted.  Reek trails of whiskey when he exhaled,
smoke of tobacco and frost and fermented night.  Imagine

the snow melting out of his boot treads onto the tavern floor,
the same lavender day-glo nap on the backs of his daughter’s
toy ponies.  Maybe the ghost of your purple heart uncle

bought the first shot, or maybe the ghost of your grandfather
killed by a falling log, or the grandfather gone out for cigarettes
who lit down the tracks to Idaho leaving one daughter

to raise the rest.  Maybe they all shared a smoke on your roof,
from the same wrinkled pack, as you and your love
and all of your dolls slept sweetly beneath new shingles.

from Margie 

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© Copyright, 2012, Pamela Gemin.
All rights reserved.