My Father's Job

MY FATHER’S JOB This is sulphur, and this coal, my father’s job is to build machines out of the earth smeltered then poured in these mills; incandescent reunion with its childhood, like a theophany would feel. But this has nothing to do with second-grade show-and-tell, me up front holding a White Owl cigar box full of elements: yellow, black, gray. I would show them these three earths heated so hot almost as much as the center of the earth. But the measurements must be exact, how when they cranked open the massive furnace doors you could only look beyond through a thick slab of blue glass before your eyes and when you did there was nothing else in the world for you: transforming and transformed. I would hold huge bolts and shafts in small hands: what comes out is steel when it’s cold, when it’s older. My father’s job is to build machines out of this earth. He tools steel into mills, long black-roofed gray buildings that all night would fill the eastern sky with yellow, artful dawn.

Joseph Allgren