CLEANING SHOES

Cleaning mud off of running shoes
after my wife and our exchange student
went to an orchard to pick apples
the day after a rain. I forgot to clean them
the first day and so the mud hardened
which is actually better, I forgot.
Then you can hammer the mud off
by thwacking the shoes on the concrete.
Plus it makes you feel good
to be thwacking something that hard
that you know you won't hurt.
Get all that anger and agression out
harmlessly take it out on the shoes.
The mud doesn't fall easily though
because the cracks on the shoe treads
have it lodged in there good
so I get a screwdriver out of the kitchen
junk drawer and dig and thwack,
thwack and dig. Just mud. Just dirt.
Everyone knows that the dirt
has the bones of the native people
in it, and the exoskeltons of bugs
hundreds of millions of them,
shit, of course, from every animal
that ever roamed the earth here
where one time an inland sea
covered up our future. Shit
and debris from the digestive
tracts of how many animals
regurgitated, and dried
flower heads and stems, grasses,
seeds, nuts, ants, worm castings,
detritus, mold, slime and fungus,
and it's all good. Every day
of our lives we eat the earth
and drink it, a huge mother
whose milk drips,
squeezes out of her like
a kangaroo mother, a mole mother,
a whale mother. Squeezes
and sucks, the baby sucks
for it's life and we do not understand
anymore as a population
of de-brained TV troglodytes
born into war and the making
of war, born into the delivery
of death like a firey baby
from hell. They say to me
that all will be well someplace
once we kill off everything
we don't need but I do not
believe it. I do not belive there
is any hope, unless the hope
of a quick and painless death
is something to put on my
Santa's wish list. Unless
seeing the world up in flames,
choppers on every rooftop,
people running through the streets
with no food no water no clothes
is something to hope for
then if not I do not have any
hopes for the human race. But this
dirt that was mud that's hardened
on my wife's shoes, and our
exchange student's shoes,
can I ask it to tell me
what there is to hope for?
Is it good enough to believe
in Jesus? What does the dirt say?

THE WEIGHT

I wanted to save your life but I couldn't.
A heavy stone lay on my leg, I was being crushed
beneath the heft of it and the mass of it, it had
lain on my leg a long time. I tried to reach out for you
because I could hear your voice. Sometimes
it sounded like a little kitten on the porch,
other times a baby crying. Sometime I thought
I heard you say something like "Help me,
I am dying," but I couldn't be sure. The weight
on my leg was unbearable. After a couple years
I began to wonder if I would ever be able
to get the weight off. I wanted to help you
and I wanted to help myself. I thought to myself
"If I can only help myself then I will be able
to help that other person, whoever it is."
So I thought about the weight on my leg
a lot. You might say that I concentrated
on the weight. I decided that the best thing
for me to do would be to study the weight
and so I started school, and then I finished.
So after that I realized that I had learned
a lot of facts about a lot of other things
but I had not learned what it was I needed to know,
it seemed, about the weight on my leg
because the weight was still there and I
was still pinned beneath it. I hated it.
I hated its shape, huge and black
at night, and smaller appearing
and sort of translucent during the day.
Many people spoke to me during the day
each day, and I suspect that it was
out of politeness that no one
ever mentioned the weight.
To me it was so obvious.
But since I had gone to school
and had learned nothing about it-
what constituted it, what were
its properties, was it heavier
than gold, could it float if it
were to be moved, by some miracle
into water? Some nights I lay there
and looked at it so intently
it seemed to disappear
or to become the night sky almost-
sometimes I thought that I could see
stars in it, and planets, and sometimes
I even thought that the Milky Way
stretched across it. Sometimes I felt
close enough to understanding it that I thought
that I might cry, or cry out for joy
but I knew deep down inside of myself,
down where it's darkest and deepest
and only the shapes live of the howling
dogs and the naked women who tried
to lure me into forgetting about the weight,
I knew that there probably would never
be an answer, or at least not an easy one.
I resolved to live with the weight, to not
be able to be like other people, or at least as I
understood other people to be-out there
getting great jobs that required creativity
and chutzpah, having kids, smart kids,
who grew up healthy, driving good cars
and living in better neighborhoods
than where they had grown up. I never
could figure it out, so I went back to school
and studied the weight again, this time
from the scientific and social angles
not just from the artistic one that I had preferred
so many years ago. But still at night
though now I understand something
about the specific gravity of the weight
and something about the development
of these same sorts of weights amongst
the indigenous cultures of both Aftrica
and New Zealand, though I know now
that at its heart it has the same
qualities of an obsidian stone,
even though I know that one out of three
American housewives say they too
have felt a terrible weight for years
lying upon them like a dark evil
thing in the night, that they feel
that they can take no actions, and that
over 50% of American males
responded in like manner to the battery
of tests conducted at several major
national research institutions,
I can still hear that voice calling
to me somehow, though much
more faintly, I can still hear it
calling out to me and so I shout
back to it "I want to help you
but I can't! I'm sorry I can't
help you! I have this weight on me,
do you understand? I can't help you!"

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Tag: Greg Kosmicki