“…if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.”
—Philip Levine, “What Work Is”
You could have walked past that pockmarked driveway
never seeing the honey locust in the backyard,
behind the birch in the front where the dog tied to the porch
is making a ruckus, where rain began to fall, lightly at first,
then pinging across the roof, splashing
from the slapdash PVC downspouts,
as if these small misdirections could stop the brick
and concrete walls from sloping, bowing, from becoming dust,
where two brothers and their father crouch,
waterlogged, beneath the wheel well of a too-old car,
soaking in the grayest Pittsburgh rain, finagling bits with the needle-nose,
losing grip on the brake springs that are unwilling to stretch
across the pads, cursing each slipping piece, flinching
at the sharp and delicate kickback, tired after long
sledgehammering those rear drums apart,
only to break what was within, prying open a decade-
and-a-half of rust suturing metal
to metal, a thick and barnacled crust, heavy
and toxic as the brake fluids spilling now from the broken rubber wheel cylinder
busted open and bleeding
from all the hammering, refusing to compress
with the springs, to be anything but an obstacle, another part to repair,
for this family who cannot afford to move
beneath the mortgages, second mortgages, rent, repairs,
credit cards. You see now, both brothers still squatting,
both over thirty, both struggling to make
ends meet, like their father who works part-time even after retirement.
Look closer: as far as you’ve come, you still haven’t figured out
what it is. You want to keep walking, away from each decade
of sweat, stress, and toil and call it work. You wanted to march
on Labor Day with the teachers union but you have never taught. Instead
you tried to help yourself, went nowhere. Whether you have ever taken a sledge
to a tire and missed, felt your skin frying
on some manifold or forgot to flip the emergency brake
of your car and watched it tumble from the aluminum car jack
that came with the used Nissan and the tire iron that never fit the spare,
the car that just has to make it eight more months,
just eight more months, whether you have done this all
during overtime or in the morning before your shift,
you still don’t know what it is, because the work
is still not finished, is only beginning, is learning to say
how much they mean to you, to wonder
why you need this breaking to say anything at all, before everything becomes dust,
and when they are nagging and failing, and asking a lot of you,
more than you have, and even when you can’t fathom what they mean,
and your father might very well be the strangest man on earth,
you must begin to commit to the long work, the long shift,
to repair what you’ve never had,
you must realize that there are no punch cards
to measure the dollars saved or lost. There is only rain
sleeting across the roof, falling from that front porch
where you never sat together long enough, you
never enjoyed sitting in that cramped house, you were trying
to escape. You have always been trying to escape. You never will, and now
knowing this you could begin to understand. You could begin to rejoice.
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