FRED VOSS

ROLLING DOWN WALT WHITMAN’S OPEN ROAD

Now that I have worked 50 years in the factories
I am beginning to feel old as the sea
wearing stones down
into grains of sand
as I shave the steel
I understand
ancient volcanoes and burned-out red
suns
the first street walked down 6,000 years ago and the last bubble on the surface of the sea
after the Titanic sank
the sweep of the wind that blew Ulysses’ sail
is in my push broom
pushing a little mountain of the shiny chips of aluminum I have cut
across a concrete floor
with a poem rising in my brain
I go on
like the turning of the earth and the old hibernating bear
awakening for one more spring
as a young machinist asks me how to indicate a machine head
perpendicular to a machine table with the sweep
of an Interrapid dial indicator
I am Moses
leading him out of the wilderness toward a paycheck
he can live on
I walked the earth
when Marilyn Monroe and Jim Morrison still did
had a father
who rode in Henry Ford’s Model A rumble seat
I can press my palm against the side of a block of steel being carved by a cutter
and read its vibrations
as well as any ancient gypsy fortune teller reads the future with the stars
inside her crystal ball
and tell the young machinist to turn his machine spindle down
from 410 rpm to 235 rpm
so the razor-sharp tool steel cutter will never shatter
in front of his face
the feel in my fingers full of ten thousand days of wisdom that can never be put
in any book
I am gravity and tide and squareness and poetic justice
a classic 1925 Rolls Royce with an engine that still
hums
rolling down Walt Whitman’s
Open Road.

THE RABBIT IN THE MAGICIAN’S HAT

Work
is the claw of the black raven clutching the midnight branch
above Poe’s head
the lens
of Galileo’s telescope finding the shadow on the moon that gives the Pope
nightmares
work
is the turning of a wheel the lifting of a pen
the rabbit
in the magician’s hat the comb
in Einstein’s trashcan the Gila Monster
under the Death Valley rock the handcuff
falling from Houdini’s wrist the breathing
of a bear the rolling
of a Chicago pool ball a smokestack full of lightning a diamond ring
in a gutter a Twilight Zone
twist ending mud on a murderer’s shoe under Sherlock Holmes’s
magnifying glass work
is bars of steel in a boxcar and whiskey in a steel cutter’s
thermos work
is a Gershwin piano key a Beethoven fist-knock
a Jackson Pollock paint drip a Nureyev toe
an Abominable Snowman footprint a Jack the Ripper
fingerprint work
is inside the seashell and under
Einstein’s fingernail it never
misses a beat or questions a moonbeam or stays
the same it is moving moving moving moving moving
ahead like the train
carrying Lincoln towards Gettysburg and Capone
toward Alcatraz it is the swan floating the volcano
trembling Sirius twinkling Bette Davis
snarling scales balancing frogs awakening
horseshoes clinking Henry Miller riding a bicycle through Paris King Kong
bending a New York City elevated train rail with his fists
as amoebas and atom bombs
equations and icepicks
folk songs and pythons
work.

ALWAYS MIRACULOUS

When I first picked up a wrench in a machine shop
lightning
forked above a caveman’s head to tell him there was magic in the world
an ex-con
lit a welding rod that could lead him
toward a new life
graveyard shift workers lined up at a bar after wrestling steel all night
and lifted frothy schooners of beer to their lips
as the dawn sun peeked above the horizon in their upside-down world
where they had to cover their bedroom windows with aluminum foil and try
to sleep under a burning noon sun
when I set down my PhD dissertation pen
and picked up a cutting torch that roared louder
than mad King Lear howling naked in the wilderness
under midnight rain
I didn’t know there was poetry
in the knuckles of a man with a hand-grinder motor
strapped to his palm polishing steel
until it shone bright as Cleopatra’s
ring
I didn’t know the hammer in my fist
was the one in Beethoven’s heart
when he wrote his DA-DA-DA-DA 5 TH
or that Blanche Dubois
held eternity in her palm on a rainy New Orleans afternoon
while Stanley Kowalski bowled in a flowery shirt
or that my machine’s cutter
sliced steel in time with Michelangelo’s chisel
chipping Pieta marble
Hamlet held up Yorick’s skull
and contemplated mortality
while I dropped a timecard into a timeclock
cutting up men’s lives into decades of one second ticks
like a butcher’s cleaver
chopping meat
and now I have written 3,000 poems about work
that could never have existed
if I hadn’t pulled open a Kennedy machinist toolbox drawer
thinking that it only held pieces of shim stock and socket head cap screws
inside
and not the souls of 10,000 machinists
always miraculous
as the first rose
opening in spring.

Fred Voss has had three collections of poetry published by Bloodaxe Books (UK), the latest of which, Hammers and Hearts of the Gods, was selected as Book of the Year 2009 by The Morning Star (UK) and was reprinted by Pearl Editions (Long Beach, CA). It is available on Amazon, along with his first novel, Making America Strong.