Coinage of the not-yet-wholly-
hardened custodians of public
health, as health is roughly measured
?in the rougher parts of Dearborn.
Meaning, how many parents,
?when things get bad, are wearing
what they’ve slept in when they come
?to pick up the kids at school.
The best of talk, said someone
?once, is shop talk: we can go
to it as to a well. But manifolds
?and steering racks are going
the way of the wells—offshore—
?so the-nifty-thing-you-do-
with-the-wrench-when-the-foreman-
?has-sped-the-line-up
has become a ghastly shorthand for
?despair among the people
you are paid to help. Despair,
?sometimes, of helping. In
the winter dawn a decade and a half
?ago, we’d gather around
the school bus stop—the unshaved
?fathers, mothers, dogs,
the siblings in their snowsuits—so
?the children bound for
Johnson Elementary might have
?a proper sending-off.
The privileged of the earth, in our
?case: words and stars
and molecules were all our care,
?a makeshift village blessed
with time and purpose. And
?a school bus stop,
to make it seem like life. By far my
?favorites were the Russian
mathematicians: bathrobes hanging
?below their parkas, cigarettes
scattering ash, their little ones for the
?moment quite forgotten, they
would cover the walls of the shelter
?with what
to most of us was Greek but was
?no doubt of urgent consequence
for quantum fields. So filled with joy:
?their permanent markers on the
brick. And then
?the bus, and then the children off
without us and our little human pretext
?gone. Fragile the minutes.
Fragile the line between wonder
?and woe. The poet when he
wrote about our parents in the garden
?gave them love and rest
and mindfulness. But first
?he gave them honest work.
