Sheet metal is hard on the hands,
even with gloves the steel works itself
into old wounds until they no longer
heal. At 60 feet in the air my father
bends metal, brings one pipe to the next
bereft, he swipes at his life on the cold
splicing machine as it cuts soundly
two-by-two. The guy who fell through
a black hole yesterday dropped his head
on the way down, they don’t pray for him,
the work’s been slow, he was the son
of the foreman and didn’t care about
dark places where men don’t walk,
only tread. Near the end of the shift
they walk over his blood, as the new
foreman says watch your backs,
we don’t need no wiremen bailing out
before we’re done. One day his girder
broke and the scaffold swung away
and then back like a trapeze act against
the brick side of a building, my father
and two others clinging there in the bleak
a.m. hours as he remembered hearing
that some guy from Local 80 had won
the lotto. Lucky-son-of-a-bitch
he thought, before he was saved.
