All that I know about work I
learned from grandmother’s hands.
I learned when there is no work,
work will be hardest.
I learned to wake early because
dreaming accomplishes nothing.
A cupboard full of dreams is bare.
No one ever called my
grandmother a dreamer.
Her hands were practical as calendars
and equally familiar with the
unsympathetic seasons that
came and went as they willed.
Onions must be pulled in April
and cry all you want—
there is no changing an onion.
There is no way to coax
an apple before Fall.
Between onions and apples her
fingers bled through the picking
of a billion ripe green beans.
Her hands, bereft of diamonds
or gold, were sun-adorned tools
working the earth until it frosted
then into the sweater factory to
mend for pennies. The coughing factory,
the factory tears couldn’t fix,
the factory that forbid dancing;
fingers caught dancing would be
put to the needle.
Though she loved dancing she
got through unharmed, if a
little hardened. She could still
count ten on her rusty hands.
Some sixty years later she could
still pull a blanket up around me
as I pretended to sleep.
Needle threading, bean picking, dirt digging,
pasta kneading, grandchild
tucking-in dream machines.
Ninety-five years of use,
no warranty, nothing guaranteed by prayer,
through coal ash cold and thorny
bake-a-dust-cake summers when
work only grew longer with the day.
Are there machines still built like those hands
that feel so beautiful against my cheek?
Machines that run on love,
such pure fuel.