cleaning out the garage

A cloudy day, the filtered light amenable to hard work. Watching you clean out the garage with the cats staring amazed, I wonder why I’m so passive in the face of such spousal aggression. I wish I could help, but I don’t know what you’re doing, and my presence merely annoys. You shove a barrel of sand to the rear, behind the snowblower. You stack scraps of lumber in neat piles. You hang our bicycles from hooks screwed into the beams to get them out of the way. Here’s something I can do. I lift an air conditioner you can’t budge. It weighs a hundred pounds, but my firefighter training taught me to handle dead weight. I enjoyed playing the corpse in training sessions, but I liked hefting the corpse even more, slinging it over my shoulder like a sack of corn. I could sling you over my shoulder, although my aged bones would creak. The air conditioner is no challenge. The sensation of being useless, merely a pack animal, saddens me to my soles. Maybe I can sort stuff to bring to the landfill. Maybe I can lie in the driveway as if deceased, then rise like Jesus to embrace the motley sky. Who is up there, anyway? Neither of us believe in whatever believers believe in. How often we’ve derided the true believers. We stood aside while certain members of our generation claimed the heavens for themselves. Let them have that colorless vacancy. Let’s wallow in earth tones with all our fibers singing. But you’re too busy to attend to my celebration of the body in its plaintive but authentic glory. Tonight, I’ll read you a little Whitman, and then you’ll see. Your dormant organs will suddenly feel brisk and tingling.