The truck was crushed and dented Almost beyond recognition When the county boys reached the scene (Though, as one of the deputies remarked, Having seen the vehicle tottering around town For virtually all his born days Still ain’t much worse than when it started) Apparently having slid off the Stamford Road Then down the embankment Where it had made an unhappy embrace Of a utility pole near the old Ulster and Delaware tracks, A rather unhappy ending to what had been An arguably equally unhappy existence, Though old Doc Benner had surmised The junkman had probably been dead Before the truck had made the shoulder, Or so he had said at the graveside service (He being one of the three or four in attendance Feeling that one who’d been a common thread In the existence of so many for so long Should not go without some commemoration In this already frayed-at-the-edged little town) And he remarked that the old man had once told him, When the doc noted the old saw That one man’s trash was another’s treasure, The main diff’rnce ‘tween trash and treasure Is just a matter of expectation, And it would have been most poetic if, After the reverend’s perfunctory hand-off to the Almighty, The clouds had broken and a thin shaft of light Had fallen upon the junkman’s stone, Or perhaps a gentle rain commenced To heal the disturbed sod, But the skies remained a slate-gray truculence As the sexton’s ancient pickup tottered away, The ropes and shovels tossed higgledy-piggledy Under an ancient and somewhat watertight old tarpaulin.