I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. - Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I wake up before the sun
Boots by the door.
Coffee black as a midnight train.
The street still quiet,
holding its breath
before the engines start talking.
Somewhere out there
a man is opening a book
big as the world,
turning pages like windows.
But my hands
are already learning the morning
the hard way.
Grease.
Cold air.
The slow song of steel.
I used to think about it,
all them lives I wouldn’t live.
The man under a yellow lamp
reading till morning.
The man walking foreign streets
with poetry in his pocket.
The man who knows
the names of the stars.
I ain’t him.
Most days
I’m the man on the early bus
with dust on his sleeves
and sleep in his eyes.
And I won’t lie,
that thought used to sit on my chest
heavy as a toolbox.
But a man learns things
working long enough.
You learn the music of a hammer.
You learn how a wrench
can argue a bolt loose
like an old preacher arguing sin.
You learn the quiet pride
of putting something right
that the world tried to break.
Turns out
there’s stories
in a pair of tired hands.
Turns out
the sky opens wide enough
even for a working man.
Some nights I sit on the steps
after the day lets go of me
and watch the clouds roll west...
big slow chapters of blue.
And I figure maybe
I won’t read every book.
Maybe I won’t live every life
a man can dream.
But this one -
this good stubborn working life -
has my footprints in it.
My sweat in the soil.
A chair at the table
pulled out for me.
And when night comes down
soft as a blues song,
I sit there awhile
watching the dark come in.
GBS jr
2023
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