and beaten into an early grave.
And I, healer and name-brand magician,
I must raise them from the dead,
prop them up and coax their failed motors
into the life signs of hum and whir.
They go out, they come back,
these wounded, cracked plastic-and-chrome marvels
of the mediocre, of the watery omelette
and bland, confused margarita.
We should learn from our mistakes:
the lawnmower plugged with muddy oil
will foul again, and again
the nightmare ice maker will vomit
its perfectly formed cubes into the void.
Freon again and oh ever again freon
spewing through the endless circuitry of the freezer,
thumping along, hissing through leaks.
The two girls who lugged in
the computerized cappuccino machine,
chattering and letting their bright eyes
and flashing hands erase the shadows
of the shop—how could they have known my limits:
the modern and high-tech, the microwave ovens,
for instance, with their digital readouts
and soft little gongs that puzzled me
almost into retirement months ago.
Give it up, my wife said,
you’re as obsolete as they are,
pointing to the prewar junk piling up unclaimed.
The girls frowned and took it back.
Hunching their shoulders like old women,
they stumbled out, letting the door bang shut,
flinging the shop back into darkness.
I have learned from the inventions of history,
but I live in the age of wonders,
of the self-contained and irreparable,
where I stand and watch
the small, good things of my hands
drifting far away into the corners of my life.
Work
Work is a transient form of mechanical energy by means of which certain transformations of other forms of energy are brought about through the agency of a force acting through a distance. . . . Work done by lifting a body stores mechanical potential energy in the system consisting of the body and the earth. Work done on a body to set it in motion stores mechanical kinetic energy in the system of which the body is one part.
—HANDBOOK OF ENGINEERING FUNDAMENTALS
I. Work
Drill collars lie on racks and howl
in the blunt wind. A winch truck waits
in the shop yard beside an iron block,
hook and cable coiling down, dragging
through dirt that blows in yellow gusts.
East across a field where the slag sky
of morning bends down, a man walks away
from a white frame house and a woman
who shouts and waves from the back porch.
He can hear the shop doors banging open.
Inside, where the gray light lifts dust
in swirls, tools rest like bodies dull
with sleep. The lathe shudders and
starts its dark groan, the chuck’s jaw
gripping an iron round, the bit set.
Outside, the man approaches the iron block,
a rotary table, judging its weight,
the jerk and pull on the hoist chain.
A bad sun heaves the shadow of his house
outward. He bends down. A day begins.
II. The Body
Looping the chain through the block’s eyes,
he makes a knot and pulls the cable hook through.
The winch motor starts up, reeling in cable slowly
until it tightens, then drops to a lower gear
and begins to lift. The motor’s whine brings
machinists to the shop windows, sends sparrows
fluttering from highwires where the plains wind
gives its bleak moan and sigh. When the brake
is thrown, the block jerks and sways five feet
above the earth, straining to return, popping
a loose cable thread and making the gin poles
screech in their sockets like grief-stricken women.
From the house the man is lost in the blaze of a sun
gorged to bursting and mirrored in the shop’s
tin side. The block hangs, black in the red air.
III. The Body and the Earth
Beneath the rotary table the man reaches up
to remove the huge bearings, and oil winds
like a rope down his arm. He places
each bearing big as a pendulum in the sun
where it shines, swathed in grease.
It is the heart of the day, and he feels
the sudden breeze cool his face and forearms,
wet now with the good sweat of hard work.
The wind scrapes through stubble, making
a papery sound that reminds him of harvest:
him, his father, the field hands crowded around
a beer keg to celebrate the week’s cut, dirt
drying to mud on their damp faces, leaving
bruises and black masks. Now, kneeling
in the block’s cool shadow, he watches clods
soak up the brown pools of oil and sweat.
IV. The System of Which the Body Is One Part
On the downside of the workday,
when the wind shifts and heat stuns the ground
like an iron brand, the machinists lean
into the shadow of the shop’s eaves
and gulp ice water, watching the yard hand now
as he struggles in his black square
to slip each bearing back in place, each steel ball
that mirrors back his eyes, the stubble field, the shop,
the white frame house, the sun, and everything beyond,
the whole circumference of seen and unseen, the world
stretching away in its one last moment
when the chain makes that odd grunting noise,
and sighs click, and then click, and sings through the eyes
of the block as it slams the ground and the earth takes
the thud and the men freeze and the woman strolls out to see
what has happened now in the system of which the body is one part.
L’Attente
The little man sitting at the top of the stairs
looked up at me through eyes dark and unreachable
as stones at the bottom of a pond, and said,
Waiting is the brother of death.
In Degas’ painting, a woman dressed
in the native costume of death waits
seated on a bench beside her daughter,
a ballerina in blue ribbons and white
crinoline who is bent over slightly
as if she might be ill, ill with waiting,
the harness of the future heavy
around her neck. The mother leans forward,
elbows resting on thighs, and holds
her umbrella out before her in a kind
of resignation, a dropped semaphore,
a broken code. She is beyond language,
and though you cannot see her eyes
beneath the wide brim of her black hat,
something about the jaw and chin, some
thin line of shadow, tells you the eyes
are set in the dazed stare of memory,
the white gloves she wears are the white dresses
of childhood, the white Sunday mornings
narrowing toward the vanishing point
like rows of sycamore along the boulevard.
I said to the little man at the top
of the stairs, Yes, I know, I am waiting, too.
And I invited him in for a cup of tea.
Then we sat down at the table on the balcony
drinking our tea, not speaking, warm
in each
other’s company, like children
waiting for a ballet class to begin,
waiting for the dancing to begin.
FROM
The Art of the Lathe
(1998)
Beauty
Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful . . .
—JAMES WRIGHT, “AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTIN’S FERRY, OHIO’
I.
We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she says,
what are you thinking? And I say, beauty, thinking
of how very far we are now from the machine shop
and the dry fields of Kansas, the treeless horizons
of slate skies and the muted passions of roughnecks
and scrabble farmers drunk and romantic enough
to weep more or less silently at the darkened end
of the bar out of, what else, loneliness, meaning
the ache of thwarted desire, of, in a word, beauty,
or rather its absence, and it occurs to me again
that no male member of my family has ever used
this word in my hearing or anyone else’s except
in reference, perhaps, to a new pickup or dead deer.
This insight, this backward vision, first came to me
as a young man as some weirdness of the air waves
slipped through the static of our new Motorola
with a discussion of beauty between Robert Penn Warren
and Paul Weiss at Yale College. We were in Kansas
eating barbecue-flavored potato chips and waiting
for Father Knows Best to float up through the snow
of rural TV in 1963. I felt transported, stunned.
Here were two grown men discussing “beauty”
seriously and with dignity as if they and the topic
were as normal as normal topics of discussion
between men such as soybean prices or why
the commodities market was a sucker’s game
or Oklahoma football or Gimpy Neiderland
almost dying from his hemorrhoid operation.
They were discussing beauty and tossing around
allusions to Plato and Aristotle and someone
named Pater, and they might be homosexuals.
That would be a natural conclusion, of course,
since here were two grown men talking about “beauty”
instead of scratching their crotches and cursing
the goddamned government trying to run everybody’s
business. Not a beautiful thing, that. The government.
Not beautiful, though a man would not use that word.
One time my Uncle Ross from California called my mom’s
Sunday dinner centerpiece “lovely,” and my father
left the room, clearly troubled by the word lovely
coupled probably with the very idea of California
and the fact that my Uncle Ross liked to tap-dance.
The light from the venetian blinds, the autumn,
silver Kansas light laving the table that Sunday,
is what I recall now because it was beautiful,
though I of course would not have said so then, beautiful,
as so many moments forgotten but later remembered
come back to us in slants and pools and uprisings of light,
beautiful in itself, but more beautiful mingled
with memory, the light leaning across my mother’s
carefully set table, across the empty chair
beside my Uncle Ross, the light filtering down
from the green plastic slats in the roof of the machine shop
where I worked with my father so many afternoons,
standing or crouched in pools of light and sweat with men
who knew the true meaning of labor and money and other
hard, true things and did not, did not ever, use the word, beauty.
II.
Late November, shadows gather in the shop’s north end,
and I’m watching Bobby Sudduth do piecework on the Hobbs.
He fouls another cut, motherfucker, fucking bitch machine,
and starts over, sloppy, slow, about two joints away
from being fired, but he just doesn’t give a shit.
He sets the bit again, white wrists flashing in the lamplight
and showing botched, blurred tattoos, both from a night
in Tijuana, and continues his sexual autobiography,
that’s right, fucked my own sister, and I’ll tell you, bud,
it wasn’t bad. Later, in the Philippines, the clap:
as far as I’m concerned, any man who hasn’t had VD
just isn’t a man. I walk away, knowing I have just heard
the dumbest remark ever uttered by man or animal.
The air around me hums in a dark metallic bass,
light spilling like grails of milk as someone opens
the mammoth shop door. A shrill, sullen truculence
blows in like dust devils, the hot wind nagging
my blousy overalls, and in the sideyard the winch truck
backfires and stalls. The sky yellows. Barn sparrows cry
in the rafters. That afternoon in Dallas Kennedy is shot.
Two weeks later sitting around on rotary tables
and traveling blocks whose bearings litter the shop floor
like huge eggs, we close our lunch boxes and lean back
with cigarettes and watch smoke and dust motes rise and drift
into sunlight. All of us have seen the newscasts,
photographs from Life, have sat there in our cavernous rooms,
assassinations and crowds flickering over our faces,
some of us have even dreamed it, sleeping through
the TV’s drone and flutter, seen her arm reaching
across the lank body, black suits rushing in like moths,
and the long snake of the motorcade come to rest,
then the announcer’s voice as we wake astonished in the dark.
We think of it now, staring at the tin ceiling like a giant screen,
what a strange goddamned country, as Bobby Sudduth
arches a wadded Fritos bag at the time clock and says,
Oswald, from that far, you got to admit, that shot was a beauty.
III.
The following summer. A black Corvette gleams like a slice
of onyx in the sideyard, driven there by two young men
who look like Marlon Brando and mention Hollywood
when Bobby asks where they’re from. The foreman, my father,
has hired them because we’re backed up with work, both shop
and yard strewn with rig parts, flat-bed haulers rumbling
in each day lugging damaged drawworks, and we are desperate.
The noise is awful, a gang of roughnecks from a rig
on down-time shouting orders, our floor hands knee-deep
in the drawwork’s gears heating the frozen sleeves and bushings
with cutting torches until they can be hammered loose.
The iron shell bangs back like a drumhead. Looking
for some peace, I walk onto the pipe rack for a quick smoke,
and this is the way it begins for me, this memory,
this strangest of all memories of the shop and the men
who worked there, because the silence has come upon me
like the shadow of cranes flying overhead as they would
each autumn, like the quiet and imperceptible turning
of a season, the shop has grown suddenly still here
in the middle of the workday, and I turn to look
through the tall doors where the machinists stand now
with their backs to me, the lathes whining down together,
and in the shop’s center I see them standing in a square
of light, the two men from California, as the welders
lift their black masks, looking up, and I
see their faces first,
the expressions of children at a zoo, perhaps,
or after a first snow, as the two men stand naked,
their clothes in little piles on the floor as if they
are about to go swimming, and I recall how fragile
and pale their bodies seemed against the iron and steel
of the drill presses and milling machines and lathes.
I did not know the word, exhibitionist, then, and so
for a moment it seemed only a problem of memory,
that they had forgotten somehow where they were,
that this was not the locker room after the game,
that they were not taking a shower, that this was not
the appropriate place, and they would then remember,
and suddenly embarrassed, begin shyly to dress again.
But they did not, and in memory they stand frozen
and poised as two models in a drawing class,
of whom the finished sketch might be said, though not by me
nor any man I knew, to be beautiful, they stand there
forever, with the time clock ticking behind them,
time running on but not moving, like the white tunnel
of silence between the snap of the ball and the thunderclap
of shoulder pads that never seems to come and then
there it is, and I hear a quick intake of breath
on my right behind the Hobbs and it is Bobby Sudduth
with what I think now was not just anger but a kind
of terror on his face, an animal wildness
in the eyes and the jaw tight, making ropes in his neck
while in a long blur with his left hand raised and gripping
an iron file he is moving toward the men who wait
attentive and motionless as deer trembling in a clearing,
and instantly there is my father between Bobby
and the men as if he were waking them after a long sleep,
reaching out to touch the shoulder of the blond one
as he says in a voice almost terrible in its gentleness,
its discretion, you boys will have to leave now.
He takes one look at Bobby who is shrinking back
into the shadows of the Hobbs, then walks quickly back
to his office at the front of the shop, and soon
the black Corvette with the orange California plates
is squealing onto Highway 54 heading west into the sun.
IV.
So there they are, as I will always remember them,
The Blue Buick Page 4