The rhythm of the work is to set down
Her padded bench, a flat, and trowel at the
End of a bed and drop as if in prayer,
Reach for the trowel (bent for her old
Hand at right angles), dig, then grope for a pot.
You may see each hole is deep and wide enough
To exactly take the root ball. She carefully
Holds this in her shade, tips the damp
Mass in, packs with trowel, repeats all -- three
Or four times -- then stands. Behind her, some
Four plants glow green in any six feet of bed.
The rhythm of this work, when best, resembles
How monks or nuns in supplication glide
Easily to the floor, centered, unconcerned
With body or mind, then rise, then glide again,
Outcomes not sought, nor merit earned.
In a sense it’s always winter
in this wooded county of our psyche,
where my father and I build a house,
the rest of the crew off drunk somewhere.
The contractor has taken blueprints
and a cash advance to Reno.
A white sky pays out
kernels of snow. My father saws.
I nail. Partitions take ghostly shape.
In the forest of our days, coyotes
eat bread crumbs we scattered
to find our way back to where we left for work.
We lift walls into iron wind,
and brace. Ropes of snot come out
of our noses. Sierra cold’s meticulous.
It polishes our eyeballs like a monocled jeweler.
They are pencils,
starting sharp,
ground down
each day
between grey
file cabinets,
never knowing
the hand
that writes
with their
numb bodies
slowly
as the
hour hand
goes
by.
Crowds are passing on the street,
Tuck on tuck and pleat on pleat
Of people hurrying along,
Homeward bound, throng on throng.
Their work is finished, mine undone;
Still my stitches run.
I cannot watch the people go,
Fold on fold and row on row;
But I know each pulsing tread
Is spinning out a life's fine thread;
I know the stars, like needle-gleams,
Are pricking through the sky's wide seams ;
And soon the moon must show its face,
Like a pearl button stitched in place.
All the long hours of the day
Are finished now and folded away;
The Dawn! The Dawn! The crimson-tinted, comes
Out of the low still skies, over the hills,
Manhattan’s roofs and spires and cheerless domes!
The Dawn! My spirit to its spirit thrills.
Almost the mighty city is asleep,
No pushing crowd, no tramping, tramping feet.
But here and there a few cars groaning creep
Along, above, and underneath the street,
Bearing their strangely-ghostly burdens by,
The women and the men of garish nights,
Their eyes wine-weakened and their clothes awry,
Grotesques beneath the strong electric lights.
The shadows wane. The Dawn comes to New York.
And I go darkly-rebel to my work.
I THOUGHT of killing myself because I am only a bricklayer
and you a woman who loves the man who runs
a drug store.
I don't care like I used to; I lay bricks straighter than
I used to and I sing slower handling the trowel
afternoons.
When the sun is in my eyes and the ladders are shaky
and the mortar boards go wrong, I think of you.
The policeman buys shoes slow and careful ; the teamster
buys gloves slow and careful; they take care of
their feet and hands; they live on their feet and
hands.
The milkman never argues; he works alone and no one
speaks to him; the city is asleep when he is on the
job; he puts a bottle on six hundred porches and
calls it a day's work; he climbs two hundred
wooden stairways ; two horses are company for him ;
he never argues.
The rolling-mill men and the sheet-steel men are brothers
of cinders; they empty cinders out of their shoes
after the day's work; they ask their wives to fix
burnt holes in the knees of their trousers; their
necks and ears are covered with a smut; they scour
Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this :
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain ; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.
If I were God, I would find equal treasure,
In human work, in courage, and in pleasure.
And I would whisper to the captive soul,
That all these things should be in sweet control.
That man should be from birth-bed to the grave,
Not always busy, not always brave.
That he should gather me the flower of idleness,
And the seed-holding cup of perfect happiness.