It's Monday and our trash is out at dawn
when a pickup, one of the really old ones
(from the Forties, maybe?) with the puffy fenders,
like a creature twisted together out of balloons,
wobbles down the block, a little windblown,
looking for stuff that's not as bad as we thought.
That can't be an easy life, though I get the satisfactions.
We’re all still hunter-gatherers, at heart,
and our angle is hmmm what could I use this for
‍changing a stick or stone or shadow into a tool,
which is not a bit different from making metaphors,
and the free in Free Stuff means, whatever else it means,
free to become something completely different.

Yet when he stops and swings his tailgate down
there’s a tiny wildness tightening my chest
as if he were taking irreversibly and forever
every thought I never finished thinking
and all I ever meant to say to every person
I ever gave up on too quickly
or felt too quickly had given up on me.