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