Trash Talk

 No ideas but in things.

                       William Carlos Williams

 

Looking out the window I can see him

tossing out the big ideas, 

those recycled truths

which explain everything

as the green garbage truck,

upon which so much depends,

embraces the blue trash can

with its yellow arms like an enormous hug,

then lifts and dumps the concepts

 into its hydraulic gut,

without any deliberation,

crushing ninety gallons of abstractions

into a fraction of its thirty-ton cargo

the way a filibustering speech in the Senate

over seventeen hours of blather,

reading the Bronx telephone directory,

could be compacted to a, Hell No,

which is why poetry is best as concision,

shucked corn, tops off the carrots,

the distillate, barely adjectival,

as it grinds exhausted words into

hard-earned, new birth

having swum across the embryonic sea.