Bin Day

Grateful for this autumn rain, suffusing
dampness, the season’s gathering itself
lately in; wet grass unmowed, tufting around
a plastic children’s slide, a garish rocker.
I put the bins out last thing before bed.

Nature gets on with things, its secret ministries
as Coleridge said a slow work of repair
sometimes felt inwardly, even as ageing
scrabbles at the façade, chips pieces off.
Perhaps – no, surely – both these things are one,

a reconciling to which I in turn
may reconcile myself, the locus of
control diffusing as it sometimes will.
As a small child, as children are, I was
all one thing, all the time. (Astonishing

how soon their bumps and grazes evanesce –
a knock like that could hobble me for days.)
Now gratitude unfolds me, softens edges,
brings sense back to that first indefinite
noun-less profusion amid scrape of bins.

Which is to say that nature multiplies
its own good, folds us nonchalantly in
to works begun before our need of time
found worldly purchase; and that it is good
to put the bins out in the autumn rain.