30 Poems in 30 Days: 4

A Certain Thrill

There's a certain thrill in throwing a thing away--
     the emptied shampoo bottle, one thousand
email messages from 2010, the hordes of single pills
     rattling their orange containers, the bags of thigh-squeezing
jeans you've collected, seven years of tax returns and
     greeting cards, a stack of romances your grandmother
left you, that table your ex made from scratch, the one
     he never sanded, an old friend whose sighing complaints
haunt your daydreams. 

                                     What a joy to clean house, to
worm through every closet, sweep under every bed,
     sort and consider and discard.  To slide the hangers
into space on the rod, to cart the boxes to the curb.
     What a pleasure to be this much smaller. To better fit,
if only for a second, the space you've been allotted.

                                    Maybe it's not about being smaller,
after all, but really about becoming
     lighter -- achieving, for the moment,
a kind of buoyancy, a mental lifting
     that opens you out
over the ground, over moving cars
     on frozen roads, over houses planted
in black snow.

                                    Maybe it's this floating finish,
this temporary lack of gravity,
     this disconnection from thrown away things,
that makes you smile
     when the man at the Salvation Army
asks if you'd like a receipt. 
                                              No, you'll say, no,
                                                            not today.