102 Work poems

Miguel might, if he speaks English, call the colors of ukuleles stretching their necks from yards of canvas duffel yoked across his shoulders, auroral azul, cherry pop, or mojito green, under this Pac Heights sky where the awful rich snap their heels past shop windows, past goatskin bags and spiked heels that bring them closer to heaven, fibristic sheets of celadon paper from Zhejiang,

For Harvey Shapiro I stand and listen, head bowed, to my inner complaint. Persons passing by think I am searching for a lost coin. You’re fired, I yell inside after an especially bad episode. I’m letting you go without notice or terminal pay. You just lost another chance to make good. But then I watch myself standing at the exit, depressed and about to leave, and wave myself back in wearily, for who else could I get in my place to do the job in dark, airless conditions?

Did you sneeze? Yes, I rid myself of the imposter inside me. Did you iron your shirt? Yes, I used the steam of mother's hate. Did you wash your hands? Yes, I learned my hygiene from a raccoon. I prayed on my knees, and my knees answered with pain. I gargled. I polished my shoes until I saw who I was. I inflated my résumé by employing my middle name. I walked to my interview, early, The sun like a ring on an electric stove. I patted my hair when I entered the wind of a revolving door. The guard said, For a guy like you, it's the 19th floor. The economy was up. Flags whipped in every city plaza In America. This I saw for myself as I rode the elevator, Empty because everyone had a job but me. Did you clean your ears? Yes, I heard my fate in the drinking fountain's idiotic drivel. Did you slice a banana into your daily mush? I added a pinch of salt, two raisins to sweeten my breath. Did you remember your pen? I remembered my fingers when the elevator opened. I shook hands that dripped like a dirty sea. I found a chair and desk. My name tag said my name. Through the glass ceiling, I saw the heavy rumps of CEOs. Outside my window, the sun was a burning stove, All of us pushing papers To keep it going.

The shoe repairman works behind the married shoes, his whole hand inside the boot he’s shining, everything cozy in the glass displays, laces paired on gravel he’s spread out in the window, shoes placed as though they’re walking, and beside them propped up, the wooden tongues of shoe horns, poised to serve the inanimate world ... He comes out mildly attentive, soft accent, possibly a Scottish childhood, possibly sheep to tend ... Clear day, first summer divorced in Berkeley, a time of seamless, indescribable grief; he waits kindly in his blue apron, fingering the well-worn inner sole, and I am grateful for those who serve us knowing nothing of our lives ... * The cleaner waits behind the silver bell; he’s from Cambodia and has free Christian literature on the counter. He greets me with pleasant chatter, searches through the coats, some left for years, he says; they make a soft blue whistle as they circulate on the ovals like the ones under those automatic boats. As the clothes pass, little checks and prints under the whooshing of motion, I see my husband’s coat— how long will I call him my husband—like an old friend passing by quickly not bothering to greet me. Odd now, I don’t have to pick it up, the serious plaid will go around between the women’s suits and stay all night. . . * I watch the young butcher flipping over the young chicken: he takes one wing and sort of spins it, first on its back, flinging the trimmed, watery lemon-colored fat into the trash, then before he starts on the legs he puts his hand so deeply in that the finger comes out the neck ... The other butcher sets the slab of beef under the saw: the riveting intricate swirl as the dead flesh pulls away; he goes off, shouts short words from the deep freeze— to me or to the carcass hanging by the shank?— I can wait, but the spaces can’t, there’s a slight ticking, then the carcass swings and swings ... Somehow I thought we would know everything through the flesh. Perhaps. But my days have become spirit. The young butcher splits the chicken down the back, seems to enjoy the crack of the knife as it enters the bone, so I try to. Housewives lean against the cool glass to convey holiday news and he responds without really looking up; I love that. * oh Berkeley summer mornings, aren’t they— what? past the French Hotel, the glint of tiny spoons so briefly and soberly allowed to rest on white saucers, the plums just about over, the agapanthus—“lilies of denial”— in the center dividers, blooming, or just about to— like me, hearty and hesitant, not wanting to write it, not wanting to ruin the perfection of the poem by writing it . . . At the dentist, the little mirror, the dinosaur prong is put into the mouth. Mouth: the first darkness. Nearby: the mobile with straw eyeless fishes. The dentist will go home to her family, having briefly reached inside the visible mystery and found nothing ... I imagine Wisdom in the text is like this, creating the cosmos from the mind of God, looking interested and competent; she touches the physical place with her prong, and the pain shines ... (—a man told me I better think about my ‘system.’ Oh dear! I better think about my ‘system’—!)

Down in the shipyard, day and night, The Galahads of the dock, Hard as the sinews of basin rock, Build an ocean cosmopolite. The rivets stab and the hammers bite Into the beams and plates of steel Of the Diesel heart and the belly keel. We, The workers of the world strike catholic notes On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats Epics of industry. Day and night The diapason puts The bent-winged gulls to flight And shakes the harbor and quakes the ground And leaps at the suns like Prometheus bound. Our matrix shapes our citizen of the world To cross the churning mountains of the sea, Nor fashions a canoe to sail a lake In cool felicity.

You never asked to be a master and God knows (if She would only say so) that I never asked to be a slave. Position papers, grocery lists rain down like ticker-tape on my long-march procession past where you cheer me on, waving from the wistful side of—let's admit it— barricades. You're tired of living without any joy. You think you're going crazy. You need my friendship. You're afraid to demand the right to be afraid. You're trying very hard. I know that, and you can't imagine how I wish it were enough. I need to sleep. I never asked for this; you never asked. Our twenty-five inch son whimpers in the night and my breasts hurt until I wake myself and feed him. He never asked for anything at all. We all want just to be a little happy. Listen, I see an older me, alone in some room, busy on the telephone dialing all my terrible truths. This thing has never let me live as we both know I might have; yet I see this thing can cut me down on some street or podium tomorrow— or just let me live, alone. Our child looks back and forth from your face into mine, and laughs. You worry about us, wondering if something within us has broken. You hold my body as if it were glass that will cut you. I'd stop this if I could, believe me, my beloved. I'm dying of bitterness. I love your forehead. Did I ever tell you that?

The man I pulled tonight carried a load of books. When I felt him watching me uphill, I grimaced. He gave me lunar cakes the size of two camel humps. When I answered him, I smiled to his face. He wore the moonlight in his specs. Pant seams clean as the embroidery work of his book covers. One cannot grow rich without a bit of cleverness. Should I have shown him the secret of my deft touch? The Circling Moon, the Graceful Swan? How East Wind beats West Wind if other two winds say so? Snow falls on cedars.

One of them             drops radio into hardhat and spits, Damn it, boys, we won’t need this one. But hell, they had already drilled the charge. In the dynamite’s wake, boulders turn to snow. Men walk through the trees. It’s cool now in here. Quiet enough to hear tracks rust; the Monte Ne line that never whistled through and the summering passengers unstartled by sudden dark, the temperature drop. Stones jut out, gargoyles scabbed with lichen. The steamy eye of an afternoon watches us from either end. We are waylaid by a spell. A stone slithers off or I imagine this. In the pitch I feel the others when they breathe. We are unborn. One of our silhouettes speaks, There’s a camera in the car. Bats opening like orchids. The absence of one of us, unimaginable— our present so intense its tense is aorist. Each of us afraid to leave two men he loves behind.

The wall of identical boxes into which our Aunt Sticky sorted the daily mail was at the far end of her dining room, and from the private side looked like a fancy wallpaper upon which peonies pushed through a white wooden trellis, or sometimes like crates of chickens stacked all the way to the ceiling. I'd learned by then – I was a little boy – that a thing can look like one thing on one day and another on another, depending on how you might be feeling. There were times when we were there, having our coffee and sweet rolls, when some woman on the lobby side would with a click unlock her box and leaning down, peer inside to see if she had mail, and see us at the table, Mother and Father, my sister and I and our postmistress aunt, and call out, "Yoohoo, Sticky! I see you have company!" and waggle her fingers, waving hello.

We Had Stalked the Doe Commerce. Production. Consumption. Who makes? Who takes? It's useless to give up cashmere shawls, gold armatures, SUVs, furs and silks to achieve cross-cultural pollination or transcendence. Since we've ceased to celebrate works-in-progress or cutting-edge sound bites, we photo commodities to provide a permanent record of desire in the grass and under the elms. Turkey on the chairlift. Rooster in the coop. Testimony is a cryptic relic deformed by the violence of authority. We recall the limited palette of ashen tones when we drove through Eastern Europe. Billboards, even in Estonia, summoned up fascinations with dieting, alcoholism and psychotherapy. Should we have eaten those salads of language? Should we have risked teased hairstyles and gained weight? Should we have giggled amidst severest woe? Mimicry, idolatry, fanaticism, greed. Oh, fervid tangled brushwork, what can we do to hold you at bay? I am old. I am old. The good day grows cold.