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Transfer Station Scene

by Rob Hunter 

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.

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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).