102 Work poems

(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap, like furry mittens, like childhood crouching under tables) The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black outside our window: clattering cans, the whir of a hopper, shouts, a whistle,move on... I see them in my warm imagination the way I’ll see them later in the cold, heaving the huge cans and running (running!) to the next house on the street. My vestiges of muscle stir uneasily in their percale cocoon: what moves those men out there, what drives them running to the next house and the next? Halfway back to dream, I speculate: The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old Bloomington a cleaner place to live in—right, men?Hup, tha!” Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys, let’s burn up that route today and beat those dudes on truck thirteen!” Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can, another dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’ three kids through Princeton?” Or something else? Terror? A half hour later, dawn comes edging over Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green, and over that the black-and-blue of night still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave their silhouettes against the red, and through the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men, like windup toys, tossing little cans— and running. All day they’ll go like that, till dark again, and all day, people fussing at their desks, at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all things that are Caesar’s. O garbage men, the New Year greets you like the Old; after this first run you too may rest in beds like great warm aproned laps and know that people everywhere have faith: putting from them all things of this world, they confidently bide your second coming.

At the end of the work day you could tell exactly how far you had gotten and how much farther there was to go. Of course, it was just a ditch for a pipeline to carry the reeking slop that a neighborhood of toilets would slosh together to be drained away but it was clean, the trench, the slick walls the backhoe bucket cut and the precise grade of the bottom. My job was to sight the transit. I gave a thumbs up or thumbs down or the OK sign if the pitch was right so that some future day shit would flow just as it should, down hill, but you knew where you stood, what you had done in a day, and what more there was to do and every meaningful thing I had said I had said without a word.

“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss, once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing till they can explain it to themselves.  A guy like that,” he said, “he gets to middle age—and by the way, he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until he’s forty, forty-five, and then you give him five more years until that craziness peters out, and now he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains to himself that life is made of time, that time is what it’s all about.  Aha! he says.  And then he either blows his brains out, gets religion, or settles down to some major-league depression. Make yourself useful.  Hand me that three-eights torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”

Leaving again. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be grieving. The particulars of place lodged in me, like this room I lived in for eleven days, how I learned the way the sun laid its palm over the side window in the morning, heavy light, how I’ll never be held in that hand again.

There was a time we had functional alignment. I was your individual contributor, you my associate director. On Monday I said Happy Monday, rolling my rimshot grin. Ring-fenced by cool molecules, like cattle, I battled biosimilars, sipped local gin; I tried my luck at affairs and trade fairs, optimistic as a fantasy suite. I inked the deal, the ink slick and permanent, like President Reagan. I didn’t sleep unless I felt sick. Something was always gated on a fragile something. Everything on the critical path. The whiteboard, cruel as conceptual math, scope creep like a disease. Some of those days, our parent showed up, bespoke shoes bearing Leckerli. I felt like a starlet on a cruisy backlot, an outpost of opportunity. I took on a new role, went through the motions and the typing pool. But the bonus was no bonus, any more than the bay. Like tender, it started to fray. My admin booked a good weekend of atrocity. I winced. I slid the To-Hurt folder below a molecule’s Package Insert. Then came the Efficiency Report, my resignation. I packed up the brood for Orlando, a last resort. I cut off my khaki pants at the knee, traded in the wife — this is the Epcot Center of my life! I want to thank you in advance. I’d fallen out of favor, like a nation.

Butch once remarked to me how sinister it was alone, after hours, in the dark of the shop to find me there hunched over two weeks’ accounts probably smoked like a bacon from all those Pall-Malls. Odd comfort when the light goes, the case lights left on and the rings of baloney, the herring, the parsley, arranged in the strict, familiar ways. Whatever intactness holds animals up has been carefully taken, what’s left are the parts. Just look in the cases, all counted and stacked. Step-and-a-Half Waleski used to come to the shop and ask for the cheap cut, she would thump, sniff, and finger. This one too old. This one here for my supper. Two days and you do notice change in the texture. I have seen them the day before slaughter. Knowing the outcome from the moment they enter the chute, the eye rolls, blood is smeared on the lintel. Mallet or bullet they lunge toward their darkness. But something queer happens when the heart is delivered. When a child is born, sometimes the left hand is stronger. You can train it to fail, still the knowledge is there. That is the knowledge in the hand of a butcher that adds to its weight. Otto Kröger could fell a dray horse with one well-placed punch to the jaw, and yet it is well known how thorough he was. He never sat down without washing his hands, and he was a maker, his sausage was echt so that even Waleski had little complaint. Butch once remarked there was no one so deft as my Otto. So true, there is great tact involved in parting the flesh from the bones that it loves. How we cling to the bones. Each joint is a web of small tendons and fibers. He knew what I meant when I told him I felt something pull from the left, and how often it clouded the day before slaughter. Something queer happens when the heart is delivered.

for Rick Hill and in memory of Buster Mitchell I Steel arches up past the customs sheds, the bridge to a place named Canada, thrust into Mohawk land. A dull rainbow arcing over the new school, designed to fan out like the tail of the drumming Partridge— dark feathers of the old way's pride mixed in with blessed Kateri's pale dreams of sacred water. II When that first span fell in 1907 cantilevered shapes collapsed, gave like an old man's arthritic back. The tide was out, the injured lay trapped like game in a deadfall all through that day until the evening. Then, as tide came in, the priest crawled through the wreckage, giving last rites to the drowning. III Loading on, the cable lifts. Girders swing and sing in sun. Tacked to the sky, reflecting wind, long knife-blade mirrors they fall like jackstraws when they hit the top of the big boom's run. The cable looped, the buzzer man pushes a button red as sunset. The mosquito whine of the motor whirrs bare bones up to the men who stand an edge defined on either side by a long way down. IV Those who hold papers claim to have ownership of buildings and land. They do not see the hands which placed each rivet. They do not hear the feet walking each hidden beam. They do not hear the whisper of strong clan names. They do not see the faces of men who remain unseen as those girders which strengthen and shape.

Fifteen I got a job at Leggett's, stock boy, fifty cents an hour. Moved up—I come from that kind of people—to toys at Christmas, then Menswear and finally Shoes. Quit to go to college, never worked retail again, but I still really like stores, savor merchandise neatly stacked on tables, sweaters wanting my gliding palm as I walk by, mannequins weirdly sexy behind big glass windows, shoes shiny and just waiting for the right feet. So why in my seventies do Target, Lowes, and Home Depot spin me dizzy and lost, wanting my mother to find me, wipe my eyes, hold my hand all the way out to the car?

I make the drive, walk the corporate walk, To do what I must and give what I got. I turn the chrome knob and I fill my slot. I talk and I joke, a regular guy I input and output and rarely ask why. It's pasta and wine at home in my flat. It's voice mail and e-mail, then feed the stray cat. Sometimes I go out and chat up the girls. Some want to tango, some manage a smile. Some come home and have safe sex for a while. My sweet IRA, my 401-k, Let me buy tickets to games, to a play— I go with the gang and don't get involved. I fly to St. Croix and stare at the sea. I travel first class. No day-tripper me. My stocks are diverse to ride out the storm. I buy what is solid, hew to the norm. My portfolio teaches how I should vote. I'm cautious in style, suspicious of trend. When weather turns foul I always come in. This is my choice, my new BoBo life. A two-career marriage, the tension, the strife— It didn't last long. We parted as pals. She got the condo. I got the car. She's a savvy, cool chick. She'll go really far. My folks live upstate, where I misspent my youth. They're tight with their money and long in the tooth. When I visit it's hard with so little to say. They miss me, they claim. They worry. They pray. But they seem relieved when I drive away.

When the long, long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay, I hope that it won't be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say. And I hope that it won't be heaven, with some of the parsons I've met — All I want is just quiet, just to rest and forget. Look at my face, toil-furrowed; look at my calloused hands; Master, I've done Thy bidding, wrought in Thy many lands — Wrought for the little masters, big-bellied they be, and rich; I've done their desire for a daily hire, and I die like a dog in a ditch. I have used the strength Thou hast given, Thou knowest I did not shirk; Threescore years of labor — Thine be the long day's work. And now, Big Master, I'm broken and bent and twisted and scarred, But I've held my job, and Thou knowest, and Thou wilt not judge me hard. Thou knowest my sins are many, and often I've played the fool — Whiskey and cards and women, they made me the devil's tool. I was just like a child with money; I flung it away with a curse, Feasting a fawning parasite, or glutting a harlot's purse; Then back to the woods repentant, back to the mill or the mine, I, the worker of workers, everything in my line. Everything hard but headwork (I'd no more brains than a kid), A brute with brute strength to labor, doing as I was bid; Living in camps with men-folk, a lonely and loveless life; Never knew kiss of sweetheart, never caress of wife. A brute with brute strength to labor, and they were so far above — Yet I'd gladly have gone to the gallows for one little look of Love. I, with the strength of two men, savage and shy and wild — Yet how I'd ha' treasured a woman, and the sweet, warm kiss of a child! Well, 'tis Thy world, and Thou knowest. I blaspheme and my ways be rude; But I've lived my life as I found it, and I've done my best to be good; I, the primitive toiler, half naked and grimed to the eyes, Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes; Hurling down forests before me, spanning tumultuous streams; Down in the ditch building o'er me palaces fairer than dreams; Boring the rock to the ore-bed, driving the road through the fen, Resolute, dumb, uncomplaining, a man in a world of men. Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in Thy many lands; Not by my sins wilt Thou judge me, but by the work of my hands. Master, I've done Thy bidding, and the light is low in the west, And the long, long shift is over ... Master, I've earned it — Rest.