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Bin by Bin
The 5 am truck idles at the curb, inching along to keep pace with the first man walking, unlucky son whose job is to rise when this city’s other men have only just fallen into bed drunk, sated, ghostlike from scouring the parks, pubs, bridges, piers, and stairs to the nowhere men gather after dusk. Saturday before even the sun can blink an eye. Venus still steady in the island’s eastward sky. The keys to all the city’s blue bins weigh down his belt with a music soothing to the worried sick and lonely. Discrete Man. Dutiful One. When he comes, he doesn’t hum. Deep in duty, he lets the music make itself: wine jugs, beer bottles, mustard urns, dregs in glass flasks, in crocks, in tins. Phials of ointment meant not to cure but to permit the sick merely to endure. He greets the cobbles like a lover, tumbling empties down into his barrel then up into his truck. Like the night soil man—stoic hero I saw sketched once in a schoolbook— whose patient barrow combed stone cities, thatched cities, cities of brick and timber, wattle and dung. Hauling our every stark truth into the dark.