The Engineer

Love was his real work

Though he slogged through the rest

A Depression child

He raised seven dogs

Took night classes

Worked fifty one-hours a week:

Three dollars

Age fourteen

His first day at school

Ripped the teacher’s skirt

Frightened – no English

He learned to learn

Finished at sixteen

Fought off the truant officer

Who thought his diploma forged

Aced the Army Aptitude

Half killed a captain shouting

You’re a half-track driver

He’d never sat in one

He stood short

Thick arms

Cramped legs

Paperhanger strong

Small enough for tail gunner

Ripped up those orders

His high score saved him again

Survived the war

That murdered so many mates

Dead in frozen forests;

Survived to love one woman

An engineer at thirty

Thesis – soil hydraulics

One skill he never used

Won and lost every job

When they found he was a Yid

Finally a living

Government contracts

Paid anyone

If you were cheapest

He did more with less

Never frugal with love

Adoring his wife

Terrifying her

To move, leaving Brooklyn

Meant losing her soul

She kept it

His head a music box

Feelings made songs

Chords called his moods

Far better than words

Words could be bent

He was ramrod straight

Before the Army

He loved to learn

To teach

Being kind

The unkind observed

Took what they could

Animals knew him

Children ran to him

Women watched him

His colleagues witnessed

A man they could use

He had many uses

Tried most

Told me he’d die before he retired

For once he was wrong

The same tumor that got him

Killed his brother

He fought all the way

For his wife

His kids

To live

But when it was too late

An ice machine surgeon froze the cancer

Burned his guts

Plastic clamp to stop his piss

He hated pain

Of that he learned too much

At the end

He who’d do anything to live

Said - if you love me

Get me a gun

I’m no son-of-a-gun

He could not bear to leave us

But it became his wish

The hospital wished him gone

Too long a-dying loses money

Sometimes it’s good to be a doctor

You’ve played their games

Renal failure

Offered unconsciousness

He seized more than an hour

I shoved mother and daughter away

Limbo dancing designed by zombies

That wasn’t him, was it?

What does one leave?

A craving for kindness

A tendering of tenderness

A lingering yearning

That may not lapse

Long as one’s memory lasts

All that you forget

Forms peaked ice mountains

Glowing underground

Shining above what’s lost