Part Time
Here’s a father and son running a gas station on week-ends. Here’s a way of squeezing the handle that loosens the fumes of motion, where you get each day a little further into future benefits. A locker with your name on it. A passing grade in the insubstantial history of work, because what gets done disappears, you toss a zero back and forth in your hands. Look at the stick shift in his ’35 Dodge, a Depression year that extruded a way of holding on, and he’s happy crossing bridges, the muddy current below unable to keep up appearances. Joy in the coming home and the leaving, these the cycles even sparrows know, fluttering on fire escapes, darting toward the backyard oak, visions of fledged offspring already in their little eyes. What’s size but a prejudice? Let’s talk of buildings in the blood. Elevators that run up and down all day as gravity’s fools, someone at the handle. The world spins. But slowly. Time enough to connect the cable to terminal A. Then to B. Aware of sudden sparks, bubbling acid, something corrosive entering the lungs. If this is the taste of oblivion, where’s the darkness? Why are we sitting in the sun, no traffic on Canal Street, the city giving up its shadows and the clutter of lives in collision?