A Poem

At Work With My Father


I’m not old enough to go to school,
So my father takes me to work with him.
Sputtering down the road in a borrowed orange Rabbit,
I peer over the dashboard, bounce in my seat,
Press my face onto the window till the warm seeps into my cheeks.

My dad’s left arm is darkly tanned,
It always hangs, dancer-like, out of the window
With a cigarette gently balanced between his brown fingers.
I love to look at the thick skin on his knuckles,
The creases transfixing me, blurring under my stare like a candle flame.

Daddy does drywall, a real man’s man Mama says. A beautiful blue-collar man.
He has a soft spot for me, his sidekick—
Gives me a board and a bucket of nails,
Lets me hammer away—
“Hold it like ‘at. Then tap, tap, and hit the nail home.”

He is ten feet tall, my dad, in worn Levi’s and scuffed boots.
Shirtless, his muscles are lean as he lifts that drywall to the sun,
Hangs that sheetrock as if building an altar, a bright white heavenly altar.
I sit in the shade, eating cheese crackers in the back of a dusty truck,
Legs swinging in time to the echo of my father’s hammer.

At the end of the day, at the end of the sawdust and the sun and the blisters,
At the end of the sandwiches with mustard and the cigarettes in the gravel—
My father drives us home.
He smiles over at me, tells me I’m magic with a hammer and nail.
Beaming, I grab his hand—it is cut now, a deep wound, the blood drying on his thumb.

At home, at the supper table, I run and get a washcloth.
Clean off his thumb, put on five band-aids just to be safe.
He winks at me, says he’s much better now.
Pulls me up onto his lap and I fall asleep there
To the smell of beer. Sawdust. My breath on his sun-browned neck.




Clare Brewer
10/12/05