Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
Picking berries, delivering newspapers, Little League baseball umpire, bagging groceries (they called us “courtesy clerks”), take-out delivery for a barbecue joint, YMCA summer day-camp counselor, graveyard shift at a pickle factory, spelling tutor, ESL tutor, remedial writing and grammar tutor, paper-grader for a Distance-Ed. company, barback at a country-western tavern, movie projectionist/concessionaire/bathroom mopper, graveyard shift loading packages in panel trucks, delivering fireworks, freelance editor of “Christian” YA adventure books, freelance editor of refinery inspection reports, professor at a university where the incoming Academic Vice-President decided to drop in our faculty meeting so he could get, as he put it, “a quick look at my new employees.”
But also a writer. If I want to, I can write a story thanking someone for their work.
The Window Washer’s Story
It started as a chance
to keep rappelling on weekdays
and finance his weekend climbs—
those mornings up earlier than sunlight,
his eyes tracking seams
between outcrops,
the fog like a blanket
over bedrock and gravity below—
who wouldn’t grab ahold of that chance?
And so he did,
and so the city gleams.
He washes it well.
Looking out—a quick glance through the windows—
what do the people inside those buildings see?
Maybe nothing.
Maybe maintenance worker.
But when clouds roll by, looking down,
they see one of their own.
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo courtesy Pixabay.
