Friday
Gamely trying to lift its workplace-gorked and committee-gorged head,
the late afternoon
lets its chin fall back to its chest,
of some old rockabilly tune
comes surprisingly over a website
a sister has forwarded from
And which I, in turn, forward on
to a sister who isn’t talking
to the other sister, the one who sent the music.
Early autumn wind in no particular direction.
Big, disconnected wheels.
Elvis below the waist.
I believe that resistance
keeps us upright, ok, one thing against another, yowl and growl,
though lately we seem to stay standing
by virtue of nothing more
than mutually unsatisfying inertia.
Do the leaves want to fall?
If we’re walking, we’re walking
in a little grittiness all over the place in the air,
workers filing home in blissful slight distress, the sky
like colorless gum someone chewed too long
and swallowed. The driving of Friday drivers
is always somewhat loopy, hostile, spaced-out and trashed,
meaning the mind is somewhere else, meaning nowhere, meaning precisely where it goes
when habit obliterates imagination
and we’re just sad.
But it’s Friday. We can hold onto that. We can steer
by that, at least as far as home, that place we live
on weekends.
Nichols © 2003
Posted for temporary viewing.