Men at work

Often when working
I lie in the hammock
In both senses of the word
For that is what my work is
Commercial fabrication
Biggest brightest best

I lie in the hammock
Because big and bright ideas
Often my best ideas occur there
Away from the small idea world
Of my grey metal desk
But not today.

Or for the past several days
That the workmen
Joe and Nate
Who are father and son
Have been making walls and windows
Floors and doors.

There is a large hole
In the back of the house
Big enough for the bulldozer
That has been there already
To come back again
And sit in the middle.

The large hole looks out
Onto our garden
And in the middle of the garden
On the lawn
Sits the hammock empty
Looking back.

For even though I work there
And they work where they work
I cannot bring myself to lie
Out in plain sight and thinking
While they are working
With their bodies and their minds.

It would seem indecent to do so
Without explanation
As though I might be taunting them
With my apparent idyll
When instead I would be furiously
At paddle below the surface.

And so instead
I sit dutifully at my desk
Grey and without ideas
Listening all the while
To the sound of their labor
Not my own.

(July 19, 2013)

Gumbo

 

There’s a man in a southern town who makes gumbo every day.
He wakes and washes, takes the bus to the store he works in.
He spends the day adding to what he added to the day before.
All day long he does this and the gumbo never varies.

It did vary at the start, whenever the supermarket decided,
or a member of the middle management of the supermarket decided,
that amongst the prepared soups they would henceforth offer their customers gumbo.

He reminds us a little of the train conductors E. B. White wrote of.
The men for whom there is a modest celebration when they hang up their whistle
after thirty or forty years of going up and back on the local line.
He makes us think of all this journey without real travel.

The man in the southern town has read E. B. White,
or at least the collection ‘One Man’s Meat’
wherein Mr. White comments upon the singularity
that attends these train people as regards their customers
feeling a certain sentimental attachment to them that
by and large, most folks hearts don’t conjure when the butcher
decides to hang up his knives or a local lawncare specialist
puts down his scythe for the last time.

He didn’t recognize himself in the piece, nor do most of us perhaps,
but then in the main we have little personal connection
with the sanctity of train schedules (or the making up
of gumbo by the monstrous daily gallon).

It must be said that if the store decided one day
to stop offering their customers the option of gumbo to purchase
there would be an outcry and perhaps discussions of boycotting
the place altogether, but this will never happen.

The gumbo is prodigious in its popularity and a pretty profit
is made by it directly and by all the other purchases that people make
because of coming to the store in the first place because of the gumbo in question.

However, if the man who makes it each day,
following the same steps pretty much exactly,
because that’s the gumbo the way that people like it,
was replaced (as this man indeed once replaced another man
who was the previous in the line of men who have made the gumbo)
no one -save his wife at best- would spare a thought for him
or wonder absently to other shoppers all waiting patiently at the deli counter
whether shouldn’t there really be a gathering of some kind
or even a ceremony of appreciation (if that isn’t, on second thoughts,
perhaps going a little too far).