Portside

That’s How It Is
By Jared Smith
Sunrise finds the New York shopkeepers rolling up their windows
dusting off the counters sweeping the floors shoveling their walkways
pulling pastries from dry hot ovens filling coffee pots to get the morning going
for the secretaries and executives and lawyers bankers insurance salesmen clerks
and the homeless too coming in quietly with their handfuls of fear and empty bellies
because it’s another day, and the workers do what workers do every blessed day
not too aware of what they do or whom they serve but it’s morning and they rise

and sunrise is indifferent as the clouds and passes on to Pennsylvania
and it reflects redness off the empty steel mills and foundries
where again the shopkeepers rise and here the miners line up for unemployment
or the lucky ones still go down into the darkness of the earth with fear in their hearts
and fishermen line up on the banks of the Alleghany with their thermoses
and a gum chewing girl from a diner clears egg-smeared plates from tables
watching the traffic that never ends go by along the interstate a seamless zipper

and sunrise hurries on its way out across the freighters on Lake Michigan
and the commodity traders working screaming toward heart attacks in Chicago
the endowed institutions of learning that line our cities the students half asleep
out over the heartland where the grain still grows so high it never touches ground
and on out over eastern and then western Kansas where the aquifers are drying
and the promise of America’s breadbasket is starting to grow thin

it moves on across the mountains of Colorado, hiding itself in valleys
and pointing out the oil wells and ore dumps and abandoned ghost towns
the rusting scaffolding of the Roan Plateau the toxic sumps of Climax
and the shopkeepers rising to open their shops for the clerks and lawyers
ranchers driving their herds to the high country or to the low country
   depending on the season
it changes but sunrise moves across it and as always work begins
and sunrise has no mind no consciousness of the shadows growing
and of how the same work has to start and be filled each day or
of the darkness that follows only hours behind and the light
behind that the tired muscles in a man’s arms the panic
at the morning table when the bills come out
the liquor sparkling in taverns after the day is gone
shimmering in the folds of evening gowns but
it moves on without reference to the thoughts of workers

sunrise brightens up the sands of Vegas and the roulette tables
the hookers high-rollers and papers in the gutters along the strip
the hangovers and empty wallets left over from the night before
and the shop owners the police the judges putting on their pants
the hotel windows glinting back a desert sandscape to the sky

but it moves on and peaks upon the Hollywood sign and the
cougar living in those hills and the movie makers making reality
and flattens out over the iron endless gray of the pacific
but even as the surf is up off California it is growing darker
to the east and the day is as long as the motions we all go through.

Jared Smith's 13th volume of poetry, Shadows Within The Roaring Fork, will be released by Flowstone Press in November of 21017.  Jared is poetry editor of Turtle Island Quarterly, and has served on the editorial staff of many of the nation's leading literary journals, including The New York Quarterly, Home Planet News, The Pedestal Magazine, and Trail & Timberline, as well as serving on the board of directors of literary and arts non-profits in New York, Illinois, and Colorado.  His work has appeared in more than 500 journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the U.K., China, and Taiwan, and he has been an activist in human rights on multiple issues for over 40 years, and has received support in the past for his cultural outreach work with a grant from The Puffin Foundation.  His website is www.jaredsmith.info

First Published in THE CHIRON REVIEW