St. Charles, The Machinist

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 1: I am attempting the November poem-a-day challenge again this year. 
Please feel free to comment or ignore. These will not be great poems.


All Saints' Day, 2011

“Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.” (William Carlos Williams Introduction to The Wedge, 1944)

tool and die maker, 

writer of tolerances,
martyr of a silent cause,
surrounded by endless noise,
saint in side-shields & glasses,
sideburns of shifting lengths,
shirtsleeves, buttonhole stretch.

our patron in polyester, leather,
plastic, steel, zinc, chromium,
aluminum, thyroid, tumor, trachea,
larynx, cartilage, tissue & blood.

what shall we do with the icons:
slide rule, tape measure, earplugs,
pocketprotector, pocketknife, caliper,
micrometer, lathe, mill, collet & drill?

******

I remember walking in the building,
the hum of hard work,
men in plastic hats, work gloves, tools
names on doors,
names on shirts,
names of men,
names of ghosts.

Machine sounds from below
grinding, spinning, ripping,
the pounding of metal on metal,
the thin reverb of clinking sheets,
the smell of oil, hydraulic fluid & sweat,
a coppery film on the tongue,
& the smile of a job well done.

It’s easy to see this as a type of prayer:
the precision of measurement,
hallowed be thy name
the dynamics of cast, form & mold,
thy will be done
the purity of pattern, blueprint & ASME code
on Earth as it is…

*****

Let the tabled figures stand in place of miracle,
the assembled goods, long forgotten, demand canonization.

May the patron of makers, of machinists, of poets,
pray for us, our products, & our words.

The Missing Years

"Orbits" 10/11/2011 

I spent my missing years

missing my father,

falling in & out of love,

altering states & reading books.

I travelled:

walked the dirt of sacred spaces,

slept in the desert,

slept on a couch,

slept on floors, in cars, & in hotel rooms,

in old beds & in new beds.

I found & lost a thousand dreams,

made a hundred schemes and let them fall.

They still appear sometimes on my drives:

coyotes crossing a road, the way they walk

a meditation on what they’ll do,

not what they’ve done, but what comes next.

I made poems whose satisfaction next lasts,

thought stories whose ends would never come,

smiled sweetly at the births of nieces and nephews,

frowned at injustices & cried for all things lost.

It was impossible to know how long they’d last

& there were many moments of found inside the lost,

like tiny electric charges jolting me out of sleep.

Then one day, there it was:  

the life I had been waiting for had been there all along.

Yes, I still miss the things I’ve lost:

the years of people, honest prayers, & unfinished stories.

But the things I’ve found, the things we’ve made,

are sure as the stars on an October morning & do not vanish,

not completely, but mark our movement around in orbit:

the circle that is a life that is always being found.

April 11th

A Family Affinity

My father's books on birds rest on several shelves,
an inheritance I did not wait to be assigned.
Each year one or another is pulled from its place
to double-check the facts on a familiar friend
or on luckiest days to search for color, spot, & song.
My wife endures our chants & putterings
from window to window to catch the best glimpse.
Tonight, talk of a diet of worms & bugs
sent the biggest brother to the shelf for research.
Out of a grandfather's collection,
a grandson's career as a naturalist is born,
one more beautiful case of collaboration
between the gone & the growing.