Blue-Collar Light

I still connect that dim glow to the drone
of pre-dawn voices I knew as a child
chilled out of sleep—utensil drawer clatter,
radio static, years of the same bad
jingles and same stale deejay spinning
that same obituary and blizzard update
to lunch pail clasps snapped shut.  How I hated
that thin strip of light beneath my bedroom door,
the moon’s halo hammered straight
at Satan’s forge—the omen that read
this is the blue routine you will rise to
your livelong day.  Passionless
voices of my mother and father going
through workaday motions, the toilet flushing,
60-below-zero-windchill scrape of cold
steel shovel across the stoop,
the Buick idling to a full Thermos bottle
wedged against the gas pedal,
and my father coughing up iron
ore dust.  I hated those rusty splashes
laminated in ice
when I’d trudge out later
for Saint Mary’s school—more passionless
voices lit by artificial light
five morning out of seven each winter day

worse than all eternities of burning
nuns promised we’d suffer,
unless.  I vowed back then to call my soul my own,
to someday wake, by my body’s own clock,
any blessed time of the week I chose,
to a tropical sunrise through an open window—
crow of shorebirds and salty
balminess of January surf
lapping white sand alive
with a spattering of red-backed crabs.  I swore
I’d never forget my father’s catarrh,
splotches brought up from the deep
vug of his lungs—those splattering
like spoor, the tracks of something wounded,
something weakened by each day begun
with another shot of blue-collar light.

Collisions of Reckless Love CDs are available from the Western Folklife Center (phone 775-738-7508, ext 2) and CD Baby.

© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.