The man who bullied heaps of refuse into open-topped freight containers with a beat up yellow bucket loader
and signaled to pick-up trucks to move off the scale from the door of his heated hut with caked hands
and collected cash payment from those who came to dump their garbage,
recognized the wordless man in the khaki pants and blue work shirt who materialized every Saturday morning to comb the stinking heaps of derelict furniture, burned out appliances, rotting food, filled diapers, broken-spined books, moulding Life magazines, and misshapen bodies of greenblack plastic trash bags,
who sometimes panicked off with a treasure in his arms as if it were something valuable that he never meant to throw out, or a shadow he gently clutched to his chest as if it were a life he could revive
and didn’t mind him as long as he stayed out of his way, even chuckled with others at the possibility of accidentally scooping him up and depositing the old wacko into a giant bin with the other trash.
Hunter’s poetry has appeared in (or is forthcoming in): Poet Lore, Sleet, Wild Violet, Blueline, and others. He has been a featured writer at Hartwick College’s New American Writers Festival, and an editor of Birchsong, an Anthology of Vermont Poetry. In 2005 he published September Swim (Spoon River Poetry Press).
