First Job

All evening I hunted the bird that wanted a cage of glass, here where cemetery slides into creek, fronting what was once the largest indoor leather mill in the world. There the skins gathered for cleansing, coloring, scraping, shipping off. It closed three years after a lone sparrow set up camp behind the only desk in the only full-serve service station left in town where, from four to seven nightly one summer, I blackened the pages of books with my thumbs. Whatever it sought there— thumping its frightened body against glass, into cabinets or out to the bays scrubbed raw with gasoline where the broken waited to be raised up, hosed off, fastened together in hope of coughing to life again— whatever it sought was not a dollar slipped through a window cracked because patronage was right for the aging ladies of August to provide from Chryslers cool in the sun. There was nothing to be found in books or boxes of parts. And the tools hanging from pegs were as useless as my hands, which could not patch together those straggling conveyances any more than I could with a tattered broom batter the bird to freedom as I swung at fluttering terror as I sought with useless devices some fortune reposed in corners of grease and dust.