Wheels, Fenders, Windshields, Hoods
       

It tasted bitter, burnt, like most things that summer,
the medicinal orange-peel darkness in the shot glass,
the day's damp heavy veils forming around the sun,
around groggy lumps in work boots opening car doors,
while she, at 5 a.m., in her silence and widowed blacks
sat across from me and my young, stupid years.
Her mottled hands showed me what was what:
a Fernet shot, butter brimming the toast,
raw eggs I sucked from rococo old-country cups,
biscotti to dunk in bitter coffee—they'd bear me
like the man I might become, through the dark
to work the line at Ford's Pennsauken Depot.
I hardly knew her, my grandmother's sister,
but took her tomato-and-mayo sandwiches
on hot close rides with men in white T-shirts
who rolled the windows down and smoked or snored.
Lunchtime, lying inside shipping crates we built
along the line, picking and loading stock, I read
our defective Catholics, Dubliners, Brighton Rock,
their sentences like foreign languages or chants
or calls. And magnanimous Whitman, Durrell
and his olive trees, and beautiful broken Delmore,
how I loved him, he was educated, he could sing—
Time is the fire in which we burn. I was myself
a squealing snotnose rhapsody, reading on breaks:
I wanted out, a world elsewhere, no more dialects
and hoagies, alley fights and fake florals,
women's voices ripping space to rags,
pasty summers, packing grease, and Tastykakes.
After work, back from Jersey, the light softened
South Philly's brick and glass. Paul Klee said to me
: a drawing is taking a line for a walk, so take it
for a walk that becomes a sentence in lines.
Neighbors on front steps, transistors, the pretzel guy
banging his bell, and Good Humor's pathetic tinkle.
No music or TV inside her house of shades.
I spent those summer hours, one year short
of getting out, finally, reading for my life
in her son's room. She didn't talk about it,
the secret they all observed: curtains drawn,
she sat and crocheted the Sacred Heart,
while Nico, Angelo, Tino, whatever his name was,
abided absent from her parlor: while upstairs
I heeded voices, the long gone son chain-smoked,
serving time, doing eternal push-ups
in Eastern State Penitentiary, a murder charge,
who he killed I never knew. She sat heavily
in the burnt-almond dark of her house undelivered
from all that, the misbegotten, the unforgiven,
time embittered by time. That summer before I left
the village life that reared me and put ashes
in my mouth and anger in my stifled wild heart,
I lodged in his room, ate raw eggs, got angrier,
hungrier for words in smart disturbing orders:
Zi' Mari' saw me off to work, where we hid crickets,
from the unassembled crates stored outdoors,
inside our foreman's desk, what a prick,
he pushed the line to ace his Christmas bonus,
Shorty Boyle was his name, I curse him forever here,
our crickets made him flap his lips and blubber,
mockery of the water world, uglier than catfish
that filled The Lakes, where only black folks fished.
I can say here the impossible, the silly, the true.
Who's listening? Zi' Mari', when did you die?
Old sorrowful woman, your son is still upstairs,
you hardly spoke a word, I speak back to you now,
and serve you this, my dear, in the near dark

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Copyright © 2019 W. S. Di Piero All rights reserved
from Complaints
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission