Portable Concrete Mixer, a poem for National Poetry Month

Here is one of the twenty new poems I challenged myself to write as a celebration of National Poetry Month. 

Portable Concrete Mixer

I don’t think I’ll ever be dumb enough to go to work everyday.

What life is better? Tying boot laces at 5 a.m. and sipping

Squalid truck stop coffee, or this pond life, playing on the wet bank

With mason jars full of tadpoles fat as Buddhas?

The frogs are right--rest in the sun or jump and hide until

All danger passes.

                        Father calls and I quit my squat,

Running to him because I’m not a frog, but a boy.

He’s behind the arborvitae hedge where something’s missing--

The portable concrete mixer used to stand just there,

Sagging on leaf springs, hitch propped on a stack

of wooden blocks, grass that had grown tall underneath it

Yellow as frog thighs, wheel ruts deep and empty and leading

Across the backyard to the gravel driveway, hidden from view.

                        What did you do with my stuff, I asked.

The treasures I collected and hid in there? Yeah, alla them

Sticks and shit you stacked up in the engine housing?

I threw it on the burn pile and tossed the rocks in the fire ring.

Uncle Dick sold the engine for a song and scrapped the mixer,

You gotta help me hitch ‘er up and haul ‘er over to his house.

                        Now stop acting like a little kid, we got work to do.

                        And we did.

After Work: My Grandfather's Eulogy.

On Sunday January 24, 2016, at 4:22 pm, I received a text message from my sister; it said just this: "He's gone." My grandfather had died at the age of 93, twelve days after his birthday. He was a Master Mechanic; he was awarded a Silver Star for gallantry in action against the enemy during the first wave of the Invasion of Normandy by Allied Forces; he was a careful and dedicated gardener; he was a hard worker. When we talked he never asked me "How's work?" but "Are you working?" He knew I was working, he knew I had a job, but he always asked me like that, as if I wasn't, or as if I could stop working. So, when my aunt, and then my father, asked me to prepare a Eulogy for his funeral I started thinking about his legacy, mainly the work ethic he exemplified, the lessons I tried to learn from his example, and that's where I started. I was deeply honored that I was asked to speak on his memory--I loved my grandfather deeply. And I'm also glad I finally got to read in front of him at least one time.