My Father's Eightieth Birthday 1

1 Shower of sparks from a grinding wheel flash out beneath a thick pair of hands. The bevel of the tool's edge a geometric solution To problems of shear, speed and stress, So the carbide can peel onion layers off of steel. Temperatures at the tool's tip are like a furnace; Some metal turns to vapor as the cut begins, Which raises the question: What respiratory system is made to handle whiffs of metal powder? Wouldn't it poison the blood Or weaken lungs like black dust breathed by a miner? Evidently not, when an envelope of will surrounds the flesh: This septuagenarian inhaled his iron supplement! The flesh was willing To stand the shocks and slashes, To manhandle the obstinate machines, And find a place for restless dreams. Born near a ruined castle on the River Inn, He remembers his father hiding away in a goatherd's hut, But someone told the secret; his father was drafted to the Russian front And returned years later, lame for the rest of his life. A cousin wrote them from America: 'In five years you can save $10,000, Then go back and buy land in Tyrol.' He was altarboy and favored pupil of the local priest But left the village on the River Inn at age eleven. They rode on an excellent hydroelectric train; In the North Atlantic they passed spouting whales, Filed through Ellis Island with the multitudes. At parochial school his nose was in books, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gene Stratton Porter. He dreamed of living a whole life on the land Setting his mind free to roam with the great thinkers. But his father yanked him out of high school at sixteen, Math whiz or not, no sense in all that studying for an immigrant kid! Better to pack meat at Sugardale, where German is still spoken, Learn the flutings of High German while standing on a bloody floor in rubber boots. When work was slow, pickle kraut at home, Drive a horsedrawn plow, make elderberry wine. But still the math bug was biting him. Machinist apprentices at Timken got to take classes in trig, So he waited at the hiring window: 'You're too young, boy.' Back the next day to wait at the end of the line. Pick apples for a few days, sell 'Extra' papers, No going back to Sugardale now, His Dad on the point of kicking him out. Get in line for the third time, and that earnest grin pays off: 'You're an apprentice, kid.' Happy to have a place, be part of something big, Give it your youthful sweat, no dreaming of Euclid's rules: You and the metal together will nail the rules down! 'Timken Roller Bearing products are used throughout the nation.' Money is building up in the family account; They have a little piece of land to work on weekends. And there's the thin, limber girl from Alliance, She knows all the weenie-roasting campfire songs, Eyes full of mischief, notebook full of poems. Too bad for her, her father's a crank and a dreamer, His eyes agleam with Rosicrucian tracts and utopian politics. Improvident carpenter, hard-pressed to plant a garden big enough, But that thin Sarah Bernhardt of a girl Is like the Grecian maiden in 'September Morn.' You're too entranced to cry when the bank collapses; 'Your savings are gone but the bank will settle by giving you a farm on Midday Road.' The big factory has laid you off, And you're stuck in the United States anyway, So take the carpenter's daughter to see the farm. She bathes in a stream and sings while you start hoeing. On this good land you will work and she'll keep singing, But later, there is no market for produce from your patch; Your father needs your help to work his piece of land But has no sympathy for your big ideas Or the scars you get from sheltering your sensitive wife. Timkens only calls you in two days a month, Just enough to buy bags of flour, So your kids eat pancakes every meal. Bitter work all round. Then industry retools itself, the war effort starts. There was never any chance that you'd be drafted, Not a master machinist, making parts for tanks! You fade into the landscape of the shoproom floor, You don't take breaks, you cut short lunches, People seldom see you swigging water. Management wants you to sign on the dotted line: If you'd club around with them, they'd let you join them. But you have your own secret purposes. You join no groups, not even the union core; The union is pissed off at you...a kingpin not throwing your weight behind them. There is no time to read now, but you do something like reading Sorting out the losses in your fight with the unshapen. You get up at 4: 30, every day you work overtime. You take a second job; you see further down when the surface is calm; Save yourself from entanglement by selfless labor; Do away with the local stirrings of desire. At 6: 00 a.m. you glimpse infinity In the depth from which decisions come. The factory is your proving ground, you move to a smaller yard, No time for teaching skills to your sons, let them learn their own. After work you ‘relax' by raising earthworms for a bait store, Like a dwarf in the basement, away from the nameless anger of your wife, Whose ebbing spirit leaves her restless and lost. The family home is an epicenter for dispersal. Your ailing wife goes away, sons go off to college, to Vietnam, to stockyards and laboratories. You visit your wife on long autumn drives, You talk poetry with your youngest son; You talk Walt Whitman and Bucky Fuller and Lin Yutang; somehow you snatched time to read them. You are left alone in the home town, you move to an apartment. Wounded sons limp back from time to time. You stay strong, always turning the mind's compost to bring up fresh thoughts. One daughter marries an executive a city away, Another daughter is an Amazon and wild intellect, going on digs, working on reservations, studying anthropology. The wordless part of you appreciates what these far-flung children do, But patterns from the old country click in: Should a woman leave the house? Should a young man tempt fate by speaking naked truth? The impulse has always been to nurture: If only they could throw themselves as eagerly into their search As he threw himself into his working life He would help them on their way.