The Dump Truck

The Dump Truck

(“Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.” Psalm 55:22)

The dump truck backed up to my brain
early this morning before I noticed.
With a mind already full of
sensations and untimely fascinations
there was little room for the weighty dirt
it unloaded. No one alerted me. No one
called ahead. It was there to dig through.
It was there with no refund in sight.

Besides all that, summer hid behind the hills
and left the morning full of pre-autumn chills.
I needed to unwind the creases left inside by
a cable so tight it leashed me to tomorrow’s
unpaid bills.

But then I saw, or probably heard, that my neighbor,
my brother far away on the northern plains,
had received the same delivery this morning. The
hard earth filled his lungs nearly cracking his ribs
as the dump truck drove away.

He didn’t have the cash to hire a junkman to haul
the dirt away. I didn’t have the expertise to help him.
We both shuddered,
we both wondered,
we both cried,
we both prayed,
we both wandered into tomorrow far too
early in the day.

I do not know what will happen with our respective
piles of dirt.
But I’ve seen neighbor dogs stand on sand piles like
kings of the neighborhood. The blue jays nap on
top as well. Perhaps planting jonquils, perhaps a
playground for squirrels, perhaps we can photograph
our uninvited landscape. Didn’t we come in filthy
for dinner when we were young, our feet caked with
mud from ancestral dirt; didn’t we?