• I
  • Inheritance
  • My Brother, the Artist, at Seven
  • Your Turn
  • 1934
  • Leaves
  • The Absent Gardener
  • History
  • Assembly
  • Tall Tales
  • Pennsylvania Pastoral
  • Office Hours
  • More Than You Gave
  • The Future
• II
  • Immortal Birds
  • I Was Married on the Fiftieth Birthday of Pabol Neruda
  • South
  • The Privilege of Power
  • A Wall in Naples and Nothing More
  • Sicilian Voices
  • Anatole
  • Albion
  • The Gatekeeper's Children
  • Nightship
  • In Another Country
  • By the Waters of Llobregat
• III
  • A Dozen Dawn Songs, Plus One
  • Urban Myths
  • Rain in Winter
  • The Angel Bernard
  • Godspell
  • Froggy Frenchman
  • Louie Lies
  • Zero for Conduct
  • The Gift of Winter
  • A Home Away
  • Postcards
  • Turkeys
  • How to Get There
  • The Last Shift

The Last Shift

I had been on my way to work as usual
when the traffic stalled a quarter mile
from the railroad crossing on Grand Blvd.
Then I saw the moon rise above
the packing sheds of the old Packard plant.
The moon at 7:30 in the morning.
And the radio went on playing
the same violins and voices I didn't
listen to each morning. Back in the alley
the guys in greasy, dark wool jackets
were keeping warm by a little fire
made from fence posts and garage doors
and tossing their empty wine bottles
into the street where they shattered
on the frosted roofs of cars and scattered
like chunks of ice. A police car dozed
across the street, its motor running.
I could see the two of them eating
sugar doughnuts as delicately as two
elderly women and drinking their coffee
from little Styrofoam cups. Soon the kids
would descend from these lightless houses,
gloved and scarved, on their way to school
with tin boxes of sandwiches and cookies.
They would slide on the ice and steal
each others' foolish hats and laugh
while they still could, their breath
pushing out into the morning air
in little trumpets of steam. I wondered
if anyone would step from the faceless
two-storied house beside me, all of its
rooms torn into view, its connections
and tubing gone, the furniture gone,
the floors ripped up for firewood.
Up ahead I could hear that the train
had stopped, the bells went on ringing
for a minute, the blinking arms of light
went from red to nothing. Around me
the engines began to die, and then
my own went. It was strangely quiet,
another town or maybe another world.
I could feel a deep cold slowly climbing
my legs, which wouldn't move, my eyes
began to itch and blink on a darkness
I had never seen before. I knew
these tiny glazed pictures--a car hood,
my own speedometer, the steering wheel,
the windshield fogging over--were the last
I'd ever see. These places where I had lived
all the days of my life were giving up
their hold on me and not a moment too soon.