Vise jaws from the days when Joe DiMaggio swung a Yankee bat

The new manager of our factory has ordered us to clean up our shop floor
and we machinists
are dropping things into the steel barrels on wheels we use for chips and scrap metal
pieces of obsolete covered-in- dust-and-oil machines paint brushes last wielded the day
the hula hoop was invented set screws
sawed-in-half pipes coils of baling wire weird pieces of long-gone fixtures
but as I drop steel drawbars and machine stops from before WW1 CLUNK into a scrap barrel
I don’t want to throw out Casey’s smile
from that aircraft factory we worked in 35 years ago before America moved all its jobs overseas
and we workers had the world by the tail
I don’t want to throw out Warren
who taught me only I could make myself a master machinist
37 years ago when I first set hands on a machine
and as I drop old gouged vise jaws from the days when Joe DiMaggio swung a Yankee bat
into a barrel full of steel ribbons and think of all the men now under grass
who once bolted those jaws into vises
I don’t want to throw out Vincente’s magic whistle
that could light up a football-field-big factory with enough joy
to fill 100 men’s hearts even though those men were covered in dirt and sweat
broken crescent wrench
Champ the ex-boxer talking about how he used to drink blood
before each fight
old dusty steel shafts with rusty threads
the twinkle
in Ivan’s eye as he told me in his broken English how he kissed the earth under his feet
the day he left Russia for good and set foot
on American soil Al’s Hank Williams yodel
an empty can of WD-40 oil Harman’s
long bow-legged cowboy stride as he walked his 100-foot-long spar mill
in his 3-foot-high rubber boots with 2 shots of whiskey in him
at 7 am
bent C-clamps twisted bolts gears missing from machines long melted down into scrap iron
the way Gus
used to growl, “God damn son of a bitch!” 50 times each night
as blast furnace flame licked his face
rusty cutting edges dust-coated taps forged
before the first mushroom cloud filled the sky the worm scars
Tibor’s knife left across the veins in his wrist on his last drunken skid row binge
before he set down the bottle
and picked up a machine handle
I’ll throw wrenches and bolts and gears and set screws and paintbrushes away
but as long as I can still push this poet’s pen across this paper
I will never toss one human being
into a scrap barrel.

Happy 4th of July as Guevara and Zapata Burn on Their Backs

I see them
Mexicans or Guatemalans or Chileans on machines with the face of Che Guevara
or Emiliano Zapata on the backs
of their shirts
never a word
about revolution do I hear come from their mouths
as they stand wiping grease off their fingers between machines
or in bathrooms
or sit on wooden benches eating apples against the red brick wall at break
not one raise
for years they ride a train or a bus or a bicycle to work because they cannot afford
a car
lose teeth
lose hope
their daughters will ever go to college or things
get better
as they work until their fingers are numb to keep food on the table
for their families
the eyes
of Che Guevara and Emiliano Zapata burn
on their shirts
sparkle and burn like the eyes of tigers that can never be stopped or caged
and these men from Mexico or Guatemala or Chile stand between machines
or in bathrooms or sit
on benches against the red brick wall at break and talk
of soccer games and mariachi singers and V-8 fuel-injected engines
and wrestling grips and astronauts and jalapeno sauce and tango
dances but never
do I hear one word about revolution
from these men
the eyes of Emiliano Zapata and Che Guevara burn on their shirts
burn like Beethoven’s 9th
Picasso’s GUERNICA Spartacus’s sword Paul Revere’s horse’s gallop
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence pen Van Gogh’s sunflower Galileo’s telescope the yell
and raised fist of each man who stormed The Bastille the blood
of each man who ever fell
for freedom
yet never have I heard one word of revolt from these men
who don’t dare lose their jobs
or open their mouths
as the eyes of Emiliano Zapata and Che Guevara burn
on their backs.

Saxophone on a Railroad Track

There is nothing greater
than the energy in a lathe man at 6:07 am throwing every muscle in his body
into the steel 100-pound tailstock of an engine lathe
digging
his steel-toed shoes into a concrete floor and leaning
into the 100-pound tailstock and flexing muscle shoving it across the tool steel ways of the lathe
until the foot-long drill in the tailstock’s mouth meets
turning brass bar and begins to chew
an inch-in-diameter hole through that brass bar’s dead center
it is the energy
that raised the Eiffel Tower
pushed off
the shore in a canoe that crossed the Pacific
it is Einstein breaking through years of thinking to find time stops
at the speed of light
Galileo
daring to look through a telescope and prove the earth isn’t the center
of the universe
it is Houdini
breaking free of every lock and shooting up out of the river gasping
the air Van Gogh breathed
the minute he brushed the last stroke of oil across his canvas full
of sunflowers
look at the smile on the lathe man’s face as he turns the wheel
forcing the drill through the brass
it is the roar
of the tiger the ring
of the Liberty Bell the laugh
of that lathe man’s baby girl as she sits on his shoulder and reaches up
for a star and the lathe man puts everything he’s got
into turning that wheel
and smiles
because little girls laugh and planets revolve and telephone repairmen
climb telephone poles and train wheels carry a saxophone
toward a music shop window so a man
who has picked himself up out of a skid row gutter can blow Charlie Parker’s notes
off a green bridge again
as the butterfly wing cracks open the chrysalis and Nelson Mandela
steps out of prison
a free man.

The Machines Groan and Hum and Rattle

I see a machinist standing in the corner of a rolled-up tin door looking
for a moment toward the horizon as the machines groan and hum and rattle
does he wonder
like I do why we were brought up pushing each other aside at 4 years of age looking
to find more Easter eggs to fill our baskets faster than each other
each Easter morning
why we competed on basketball floors and football fields and chemistry
exams why
we had to put our finger paint paintings up on the kindergarten classroom wall to see
who was best as we grabbed
for each other’s toys and then entered factories where we are pitted against each other
to see who can make the most gaskets manhole covers door handles engine valves
helicopter bumpers parking meter posts
were
we put on this earth to do something beside turning up the speeds of our machine spindles
and cranking handles and feeding tables faster and faster and working our lives away to buy cars
that go from 0 to 60 mph in 5 seconds
aren’t there 2-year-old children
in love with red balloons caterpillars
spinning cocoons old trumpets in pawn shops don’t firemen
give their lives pulling people from burning buildings didn’t Sherwood Anderson
give up the paint factory he owned to wander aimlessly down railroad tracks and streets for 4 days
because he desperately needed to become
a writer
and the man in the tin doorway has still not gone back to his machine
as he looks out toward the San Gabriel mountain peaks in the distance
and the parts stack and the foremen shout
deadlines
were we put here to draw the last drop of oil out of the earth
set the last tiger
in a cage
were our 2 hands meant only to grab more and more and more
our feet
to race toward finish lines
the train horns blow the cranes unload great ships the wheels turn
the cameras click the years roll by the rocket is aimed at Mars
the jackpots jingle the armies stack bombs the lakes go dry
the polar ice caps melt the rainforests die the bean counters count
the museums catalogue the wildflowers are examined the frequency
of large asteroids hitting the earth calculated as the machines
groan and hum and rattle and the man
in the tin doorway still doesn’t know
why.

Fred Voss, a machinist for 32 years, has had three collections of poetry published by the UK’s Bloodaxe Books. His latest, Hammers and Hearts of The Gods, was selected a Book of the Year 2009 by The Morning Star. He is regularly published in magazines such as Poetry Review, Ambit, Rising, The Shop, Atlanta Review and Pearl, and has twice been the subject of feature programs about his poetry on National BBC Radio 4. In 2012 he and his wife poet Joan Jobe Smith were featured at The Humber Mouth Literature Festival in Hull. In 2011 he was featured poet in a hardbound limited edition of Dwang, Tangerine Press, and his collection, Tooth and Fang and Machine Handle, was winner in The Nerve Cowboy 2013 Chapbook Contest. In winter 2014 World Parade Books will publish his first novel, Making America Strong.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter – wveditor@gmail.com
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