The Art of the Lathe

B.H. Fairchild

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781938584503
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Poesie

B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe is a collection of poems centering on the working-class world of the Midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas.

Beauty

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful. . .

—James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio”

I.

We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she says,

what are you thinking? and I say, beauty, thinking

of how very far we are now from the machine shop

and the dry fields of Kansas, the treeless horizons

of slate skies and the muted passions of roughnecks

and scrabble farmers drunk and romantic enough

to weep more or less silently at the darkened end

of the bar out of, what else, loneliness, meaning

the ache of thwarted desire, of, in a word, beauty,

or rather its absence, and it occurs to me again

that no male member of my family has ever used

this word in my hearing or anyone else’s except

in reference, perhaps, to a new pickup or dead deer.

This insight, this backward vision, first came to me

as a young man as some weirdness of the air waves

slipped through the static of our new Motorola

with a discussion of beauty between Robert Penn Warren

and Paul Weiss at Yale College. We were in Kansas

eating barbecue-flavored potato chips and waiting

for Father Knows Best to float up through the snow

of rural TV in 1963. I felt transported, stunned.

Here were two grown men discussing “beauty”

seriously and with dignity as if they and the topic

were as normal as normal topics of discussion

between men such as soybean prices or why

the commodities market was a sucker’s game

or Oklahoma football or Gimpy Neiderland

almost dying from his hemorrhoid operation.

They were discussing beauty and tossing around

allusions to Plato and Aristotle and someone

named Pater, and they might be homosexuals.

That would be a natural conclusion, of course,

since here were two grown men talking about “beauty”

instead of scratching their crotches and cursing

the goddamned government trying to run everybody’s

business. Not a beautiful thing, that. The government.

Not beautiful, though a man would not use that word.

One time my Uncle Ross from California called my mom’s

Sunday dinner centerpiece “lovely,” and my father

left the room, clearly troubled by the word “lovely”

coupled probably with the very idea of California

and the fact that my Uncle Ross liked to tap-dance.

The light from the Venetian blinds, the autumn,

silver Kansas light laving the table that Sunday,

is what I recall now because it was beautiful,

though I of course would not have said so then, beautiful,

as so many moments forgotten but later remembered

come back to us in slants and pools and uprisings of light,

beautiful in itself, but more beautiful mingled

with memory, the light leaning across my mother’s

carefully set table, across the empty chair

beside my Uncle Ross, the light filtering down

from the green plastic slats in the roof of the machine shop

where I worked with my father so many afternoons,

standing or crouched in pools of light and sweat with men

who knew the true meaning of labor and money and other

hard, true things and did not, did not ever, use the word, beauty.

II.

Late November, shadows gather in the shop’s north end,

and I’m watching Bobby Sudduth do piece work on the Hobbs.

He fouls another cut, motherfucker, fucking bitch machine,

and starts over, sloppy, slow, about two joints away

from being fired, but he just doesn’t give a shit.

He sets the bit again, white wrists flashing in the lamplight

and showing botched, blurred tattoos, both from a night

in Tijuana, and continues his sexual autobiography,

that’s right, fucked my own sister, and I’ll tell you, bud,

it wasn’t bad. Later, in the Philippines, the clap:

as far as I’m concerned, any man who hasn’t had V.D.

just isn’t a man. I walk away, knowing I have just heard

the dumbest remark ever uttered by man or animal.

The air around me hums in a dark metallic bass,

light spilling like grails of milk as someone opens

the mammoth shop door. A shrill, sullen truculence

blows in like dust devils, the hot wind nagging

my blousy overalls, and in the sideyard the winch truck

backfires and stalls. The sky yellows. Barn sparrows cry

in the rafters. That afternoon in Dallas Kennedy is shot.

Two weeks later sitting around on rotary tables

and traveling blocks whose bearings litter the shop floor

like huge eggs, we close our lunch boxes and lean back

with cigarettes and watch smoke and dust motes rise and drift

into sunlight. All of us have seen the newscasts,

photographs from Life, have sat there in our cavernous rooms,

assassinations and crowds flickering over our faces,

some of us have even dreamed it, sleeping through

the TV’s drone and flutter, seen her arm reaching

across the lank body, black suits rushing in like moths,

and the long snake of the motorcade come to rest,

then the announcer’s voice as we wake astonished in the dark.

We think of it now, staring at the tin ceiling like a giant screen,

what a strange goddamned country, as Bobby Sudduth

arches a wadded Fritos bag at the time clock and says,

Oswald, from that far, you got to admit, that shot was a beauty.

III.

The following summer. A black Corvette gleams like a slice

of onyx in the sideyard, driven there by two young men

who look like Marlon Brando and mention Hollywood

when Bobby asks where they’re from. The foreman, my father,

has hired them because we’re backed up with work, both shop

and yard strewn with rig parts, flat-bed haulers rumbling

in each day lugging damaged drawworks, and we are desperate.

The noise is awful, a gang of roughnecks from a rig

on down-time shouting orders, our floor hands knee-deep

in the drawwork’s gears heating the frozen sleeves and bushings

with cutting torches until they can be hammered loose.

The iron shell bangs back like a drum-head. Looking

for some peace, I walk onto the pipe rack for a quick smoke,

and this is the way it begins for me, this memory,

this strangest of all memories of the shop and the men

who worked there, because the silence has come upon me

like the shadow of cranes flying overhead as they would

each autumn, like the quiet and imperceptible turning

of a season, the shop has grown suddenly still here

in the middle of the workday, and I turn to look

through the tall doors where the machinists stand now

with their backs to me, the lathes whining down together,

and in the shop’s center I see them standing in a square

of light, the two men from California, as the welders

lift their black masks, looking up, and I see their faces first,

the expressions of children at a zoo, perhaps,

or after a first snow, as the two men stand naked,

their clothes in little piles on the floor as if they

are about to go swimming, and I recall how fragile

and pale their bodies s...