Fred Voss - From the Machine Shop to the North Star

We have dropped our time cards into time clocks as punctually as the sun
rises
cut our blocks of steel into doorknobs as surely as grapes turn
to wine
gravity
is something we prove each time a 2-ton drop hammer falls from factory ceiling
and smashes down onto the steel forging we hold in our tongs
in 2.4 seconds
Saturn never turned more perfectly or regularly
than Bill’s 100-pound engine lathe chuck
spinning in front of his face at 58 rpm as the sparrows on the telephone lines outside
chirp
if you took all the measurements we’ve made laying our 6-inch-long scales
and our 18-inch-long scales and 6-foot-long scales against parts
and put them together end to end maybe they’d reach
the north star
as each year the trees add 1/8th-inch-thick rings of growth to their trunks
and a swallow flies a thousand miles to perch on that same exact mission eave
in San Juan Capistrano
rivers carve
canyons
we carve trails into the concrete floor around our machines
with decades of the scrapings and diggings-in of our steel-toed
boots
scientists search deserts digging up 100-million-year-old
Tyrannosaurus Rex bones
we thrust our muscled fingers into the backs of dark tooling cabinets to find
packed-in-wax 1/2-13 taps that haven’t been touched
in 80 years
as Mitch tells stories he heard about old Ramon the heavyweight boxer who used to run
that surface grinder in the corner before the Japanese bombed
Pearl Harbor
and Carl in his denim apron expounds upon the fact that all the iron in the steel we cut
fell
from the sky in meteors
a billion years ago
history geology ornithology astronomy metallurgy physics botany archeology
biology anthropology sociology psychology metrology
there’s a lot more to a machine shop than cutting oil
and monkey wrenches.

This poem is published as part of National Poetry Day 2012, theme: stars.

Fred Voss has been a machinist for 30 years, picking up the pen and the wrench to chronicle what goes on between tin walls. He has published three books of poems with Bloodaxe, Goodstone (1991), Carnegie Hall with Tin Walls (1998) and Hammers and Hearts of the Gods (2009). His work has been featured prominently by the magazines Bete Noire in Britain and the Wormwood Review in the US. He also won the 1988 Wormwood Award. Love Birds, a collaboration with his poet wife Joan Jobe Smith, won the 1996 Chiron Prize. He lives in Long Beach, California, and works in a nearby factory.

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