Delivery from sweet drudgery

Winter Swing

The ropes hold fast to the crossboard, the knots
sufficiently taut in spite of seasons and elements,
strong enough perhaps for unfrayed kids, though
I would hardly chance placing any there.

Two thousand daydreams a day, each one
fourteen seconds of fleeting delivery from
sweet drudgery, the thankless tasks we lift
onto reluctant shoulders, day after day.

Somewhere, near the stump of a neighboring
oak, the plastic St. Joseph buried by someone
who thanked and forgot it after the ranch sold,
recorded somewhere in a dusty downtown ledger.



Nothing grows in the right direction, even the
wintergrass skirls and scurvies catawampus to
everything else as if the wind put her mindless
finger there while she considered her options.

To and fro, the nudging nibbles all night,
the rocking sway teasing out clockmusic,
over and over, unseen coyotes pausing to
consider it no threat to them whatsoever.

Here the moments are planked in the grain,
the distant laughter of school children below
in the flatlands rising up in great pendulums
singing nothing lasts forever, not a single thing.

Joseph Gallo
March 5, 2013