The Mechanics of Men

I have never been the most mechanically inclined of men.

Wrenches, screwdrivers, or shovels

have never made nice with me. In the shipyard,

I worked alone, in the dark, deep in

the bilges of frigates. For two months,

I hooked a torch to an oxygen tank with a green line and pulled a red

hose through bulkheads to gas. The brass tool

hissed like an ostrich

when it fed on metal. That day, my flame cut

permanent deck fittings; the loops fell like bright oranges;

I ripened the rusty metal. I knew

that this was a job to baby-sit me, a job they gave to bad burners,

beginners playing with their tools: who pretended their brass torches

were trumpets, and that gulls in the bay were tables

of distracted diners. When my father was a boy, his father loaded him

and his siblings in the car and dropped them off downtown

so my grandfather could get drunk and my

grandmother could pretend he wasn't drinking again. When I was a boy,

I enjoyed watching my father dig; with dirt between his palms, he spun

the shovel before he dug. As I grew, I tried

to stay away from work, even when he paid me. I stayed away from him too.

I never understood how he could work around so much grass. For him,

life was work. For him, everything was hard. For me,

it was not hard. He stalked my mother a long time after their divorce.

He never understood she was not sod to be laid, or a sprinkler to be

attached to a pvc pipe seven inches in the ground.

That pregnant at fifteen was too soon. Neither of us is the most

mechanical of men, yet we still pride ourselves on how we fashion our tools.

I wake up shivering and crying in an empty bed,

the afternoon light entering and leaving an empty bottle of wine near

an emptier glass—or roll over and try, and fail, to remember a woman's

name, which never really gets old, just uncouth

to say so, and feel fixed. To feel fixed is to feel a mechanical spirit, to feel love,

or at least to play at paste for an evening, to make believe she will never leave me,

as life almost did when I cut the green hose, and was

lonely and shaking that day on the deck of the destroyer, looking into the

green water, and wondered what would be written on my tomb:

"Killed by oxygen was this unmechanical man."

In that moment close to death, I only wanted my own lungs. I didn't regret

returning home and sleeping on my father's couch. And that summer, I returned

to each of the women of my past and bedded

them all, trying to reheat our want. I don't regret that—drinking wine

and making love, or writing poems and making love, of wanting to stay

but nonetheless leaving. I don't regret returning

with Said and Spivak, with Weil and Augustine, of telling my father

"All sins are an attempt to fill voids" or rebuilding my grandfather's

house with Hopkins in my head

as I ripped the tar and shingles off the old roof with a shovel.

And I am not mad for being the second favorite son,

Esau turned inside out. Can't regret saying

that summer, I was, in fact, already, a bigger and better man

than my father because I understood more. I didn't mind he

favored my younger brother, who knew less

than him. I favored my brother's way of living, of skating

in the park and smoking weed while I studied and wondered for us all.

How ridiculous I was that summer for us all;

for not attempting to rebuild any of his love that summer, at all.

Source: Hustle (Sarabande Books, 2014)