Every week, starting this week, I’m asking friends to comment on the books, movies, music, art, natural events, and creative projects that they’ve been finding most interesting and inspiring.

For the first post, I’m honored to present a powerful new poem by Michael Delp. Mike’s an old friend and fishing pal and a terrific writer who spends part of every year in his cabin beside the Boardman River. What’s lighting him up lately? Here’s Mike, in his own words:

“This is the beginning of a series of new poems about the value and necessity of doing work with the hands. I’m talking about what Jim Harrison calls, ‘making the long thought’ which comes to us doing boring, hard manual labor. At a young age, my father taught me tools: saws and hammers, drills and bits, how to work wood into a boat that would actually float. I spent hundreds of hours as a kid weeding, mowing, trimming Christmas trees and later, in college, running an 80 lb air hammer in the summer. I have unloaded boxcars of dried milk, 75 lb bags and a full boxcar, all day in the summer heat, enough time to kill yourself, if you desired. I know what it’s like to dream with weight on the back, and an ache in the arm from pounding nails through two sheets of roofing steel building a pole barn. It all comes down to doing the work, and working the work to make the mind a healthier place where anything, even a poem, might enter into that brief instant of time between the lifting of the hammer and the explosion of the nail into the wood.”

 

WORK
by Michael Delp

Wondering how it felt for my step-Grandpa, Eby, to see two of his fingers
sliced off in a press at the Lansing Drop Forge,
dancing, he could have thought, in that instant before pain,
to the music of factory vibrations,
while behind him, men at other presses
never stopped or heard his screams over the pounding of their own work.

Wondering how it was that my own father, his heart stuffed with
engineering equations and cigar smoke came home from his office every night,
and helped his only son learn how to run a table saw,
each time teaching, testing the blade’s teeth with his right thumb.

Wondering how his father, an alcoholic sheriff’s deputy stumbling home at night from a
job in what must have seemed like life in a tunnel with no exit,
a black locomotive with a light like God’s eye about to plow him down,
work him into the gravel bed between the tracks.
But this man, my dad’s dad, knew how to build stuff.
He taught my father the value of hands and how they did work.
For six weeks my dad and his two brothers, both younger, tore down
a neighbor’s house and saved every nail and straightened every nail.

And I remember this now, watching him lift a deck board, hand it over to me.
He’s 94 and still in the work. He could do this blindfolded, this work done by hand,
setting wood and nailing it in place, and when I slip my hammer past an 8D sinker,
wrench it almost double
he bends to pick it up,
hands it back and I do what I learned:
set it down and put it back to the shape it was
when I first laid my hands on it.

And both of us, an old man and his son, growing older,
turn again to bend our backs into the work.
And when I say into it, I mean down our arms and through our fingers, the tools working
as if they had blood inside them.

 

(Michael Delp is a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction whose works have appeared in numerous national publications. He is the author, most recently, of the limited-edition letterpress chapbook, The Mad Angler Poems, published by Deep Wood Press, and of a story collection, As If We Were Prey (Wayne State University Press). His other books include The Last Good Water (Wayne State, 2003), The Coast of Nowhere (Wayne State, 1997), and Under the Influence of Water (Wayne State, 1992). He recently retired from teaching creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy, where he received several awards for his teaching. Mike invites you to visit his Facebook page.)

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