MARK HALLIDAY
He is clumping through the snow toward the municipal trash barrel
next to General Wayne Park.
What is in the black trash bag he is carrying?
It looks so heavy!
It is amazingly heavy. It contains
two Philadelphia phonebooks and a Children’s Health Encyclopedia
and three drawing pads and an illustrated history of baseball.
That’s all? That doesn’t sound so heavy.
But they are full of ice—that is, they have become
blocks of pulp stiff with frozen rain.
Explain.
I will explain, I want to explain.
He is a divorced father.
And?
And divorced fathers cannot evade absurdities.
Is that an explanation?
There was an apartment… Then the trunk of an old car…
What is he doing now?
He is pounding the trash bag with a stone from a stone wall
to make it fit down into the trash barrel.
Should he be arrested?
No. The police have less absurd things to focus on.
Is there meaning in this?
It’s about how some endings never end.