On this fine Friday, ladies, gentlemen, let us present to you a poetic tribute described by the poet as having positively mythic dimensions. This poet is S.H. Stein is now based in Florida after many years in New York. The poem is a simple description of shingles being unloaded in a residential area.
Yet Stein explains the inspiration behind the poem in this way:
I live in a neighborhood that is vanishing in Florida. My building was once a motel, where baseball players would stay for spring training. My neighbors, like their parents, are blue-collar and sturdy. The trucker in the poem, an independent operator, reminded of them.
One morning, I watched him drive up to the modest, immaculate home of my neighbor Maria across the street and deliver shingles to her roof repair. His truck was just as clean as he himself. Then came the deftness and calm he displayed with the complex machinery he controlled. It was a sight to behold.
His rig and the way he carried it reminded me of the Odyssey , with its complex, monstrous, and often huge creatures of the sea.
I now realize that Maria, with her white hair and her husband, were Greeks. They may have read Odysseus as children in ancient Greek. So, perhaps, did Christopher Columbus.
It’s just a few lines and words but there’s majesty in the way they’re described. I hope it takes you to a wonderful weekend, wherever you are. Stein is to be commended for the portrait.
Trucker with rig, sunrise delivery
Columbus winged-red C emblemazoning
Cab and shirt sleeve.
Descending and pinch buffing a fender
speck, strolling rearward past his
flatbed
Its white caboose, sliding, settling
There you go,
ruffling gears, dials, knobs, pedals, levers,
He unhitches as crisply as NASA checks.
And pulls away.
Dropped from both haunches
Frisking caboose
Prehistoric claws wiggle in a plucky pair
fingering; eyeing.
They nod and rise as they lift flatbed freight.
mince, pivot, yaw, squeeze, snatch.
Hoisted, bobbing,
Blond, a stack shingles weighs the mid-sky
until, positioned,
Maria’s yard is blown down by the wind
it plumps:
hotcakes.
Glory for the Yankees with a pushed back cap — S.H. Stein