.17) Hymn To My Days As A Delivery Guy Poem by Max Reif

I.

The company’s magnetic logo plunked
onto both sides of my Mazda,
I sit parked beside a field of new snow
that covers my memory with innocence
in front of some faceless warehouse,
waiting for Jay the dispatcher to call.

Finally, he tells me where the packages wait.
I cross a bridge to the depressed
steel mill towns on the East Side
and the oil refineries I never saw as a child
though I grew up only twenty miles away.

Soon after that, the weather turns. The wild
spirit of the spring, a young lion,
jumps in my car window one night,
pawing me and carousing as I drive
thirty miles, across the Missouri,
for a lab pick-up at a rural hospital.

Always, I hang with my companions
NPR and endless books on tape,
styrofoam cups, delicacies and coffee,
a notebook and a pen.

II.

Every day the Mystery
of driving a sacred world,
God’s footprints everywhere
as though He just left
and His fragrance still lingers.

Even as these moments come up in memory,
the humor of the game goes on,
for where I looked for Him in vain
when each moment had its fling with the Present,
now as each arises again,
part of a slide show frozen on mental film,
I see He was there all along.

Beauty is back there calling me
even while continuing to play hide-and-seek
in the life I've exchanged that one for,
different trappings on the surface
but underneath the same 'job',
pursuing the Loveliness that will not fade.