WHERE LONELINESS BROODS
At the West Valley flea market
loneliness broods in the collectibles.
Under the arch of an abandoned drive-in.
a man collects dollars and hands out tickets
for flea market parking and a lucky drawing.
But even the tools go begging: An almost new set--
one-inch drive ratchet and sockets--
the Sears catalog lists it for ninety
but I'll let it go for. . .
They came to West Valley from coal camps
in Price and Rock Springs, bringing their stories.
That woman selling quilts could tell you
she cooked beans to feed three families
and the man passing out handbills
pulled his friend from the mouth of a burning mine.
A man with two racks of belt-buckles
croons a line from Waylon Jennings
in a teardrop tenor - I've always been crazy.
The notes rustle deep in his lungs.
He scrapes a match on his fingernail
as the sun sets behind the Oquirh mountains
and a shadow sweeps over the West Valley flea market
like the wave of a long-forgotten sea.
THE MYTHS
The first myth is of how we moved
from one trailer park to another
with the river on one side
and a mountain on the other.
I can still see the bottomland
lit by the moon, whose face
scared me with ghostly contrasts.
My mother calms me as the wind
agitates the branches outside our van.
The hero is always frightened by myths,
but of whose making?
A PAINTER'S LIFE
A friend of mine is a painter,
but he turns metal for a living-brilliant titanium.
"I'm in the medical profession," he jokes,
"because I make hips and knees."
He puts the first piece of round stock
into the chuck and bumps it
until the dial lines up
to the plus or minus one-thousandth.
As the piece turns, he studies
the tooling he'll need for the next set of hips.
He thinks of the way he'd paint shadows
on a canvas he'd like to be working on.
A piece of titanium flares up
into ash at the end of a cutting torch.
*
At the end of the shift, he locks up his tools
and opens a door on the night
full of people from Haiti to Pakistan. They are numb
with work like he is, all clutching their coats
against a wind off the North Atlantic.
He passes the steps of this city, this work of art,
and relaxes in his apartment
with a glass of red wine. The sun glistens
on brick facades and white stone sills. The winter light
etches thin lines, drops shadows the color of asphalt.
He thinks of a point on this canvas,
among these tenements,
where all the bright surfaces join
and repeat themselves, as they have
since the first wave of immigrants.
Nothing changes in this painter's life-
the same light on stone and window glass,
the same city, plus or minus
