Читать книгу Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook - Группа авторов - Страница 12

DAVE NEWMAN

The houses are being foreclosed on

but the kids are still in the streets

playing with chalk, riding bikes

and the old men sit outside a café

drinking coffee, waiting for the bars

and I am walking here

because I have been unemployed for two months

and what I can afford is the YMCA

to lift some weights or swim

then walk the cracked sidewalks outside

and I remember reading Fred Voss’ poems

in my tiny apartment when I was 21 or 22

all those wonderful lines about working

as a machinist up and down the coast

of California and inside Goodstone Aircraft Company

that awful place with sparks flying and sharp objects

and bosses welded down to the meanest of hearts

and I remember thinking:

Jesus, I hope I don’t end up like Fred.

How beautifully he wrote!

How hard he worked!

Fred dropped out of a PhD program

to become a machinist

but I was going to graduate school

so I didn’t have to work with my hands,

probably my father’s dream, a factory worker

who’d been employed since he’d quit

school in the sixth grade to load melons

but the directions drive us, not vice versa,

we end up where we end up, not where we want.

I wanted to teach college but no one liked my poems

about working as a janitor and taking drugs

and reading Nicanor Parra in the parking lot

before work with a ham sandwich in my lap

and my professors thought I was unintelligent,

not academic and/or a heroin addict, plus

I once showed up to party with a three-gallon

ball of beer and everyone else brought hummus

so I graduated in two years with a 3.8

and got a job in a warehouse

where I loaded ball-bearings into a truck

and delivered them to factories

and read more poems by Fred Voss

who was still a machinist

who is still a machinist

who is still writing poems

who is the only poet in America

who is the only poet in America

who could have survived in Wilmerding, Pennsylvania

circa 1870 when George Westinghouse

opened the Westinghouse Airbrake Company

and the men worked 55 hours a week

with steel made to stop a locomotive

and I like to think of Fred in the fire

burning with the men who had to burn

because he wanted to burn

because he knew someone needed to record this—

how practical poetry is in the hands of a machinist

how you can still build your life around poetry

when it’s made by people who make things we need.

But it’s 150 years after George Westinghouse

opened the Airbrake plant and the black smoke

looked like clouds and prosperity and now the city

is a shadow of itself, factories looking like

factories but not doing what factories do

and I have been reading Fred’s poems again,

terrified and in awe, thankful and humbled

but this afternoon, it’s 90 degrees

and I have my own work

my heart pumping past

the railroad line that hauls coal somewhere

away from Wilmerding, Pennsylvania

where Fred Voss never lived or worked

and a dog on a chain barks viciously

at a black torn garbage bag

and two guys covered with tattoos

head up a ladder, carrying shingles.