Building a New Home

The generator kicks and whines,
steam shovel treads grind limestone
to dust. I got up at dawn,
the first blue light anointing
the sweaty backs of the clouds,
both eyes burning with essential salt
leaking down my scalp.
New buildings
Break away from the red broken clay.
Excavation before foundation—
five thousand nail per plywood frame.
We’re working towards something
better—full of daylight, and easy
to enter.
This must be
the song my father taught me:
build each one as if it were my own.
Always take care of my tools,
they are the only things that matter
in this world. They will make me
known among these men.

:: Timothy Geiger, Blue Light Factory (1999)

Debts and Balances

Mornings I woke with the skyline in my eyes.
Beyond the window, the exhausts of industry
simulated the passing shadows of birds
who knew to head south, take it easy for a while.
Always too soon my father was yelling, “Get up,”
reminding me the day wasn’t getting any longer.
What did he know about the day?
Out of a job over three years, one wrist fused,
two slipped discs, he must have forgotten
what it meant to enter this world
of salt and sweat, the hand’s delicate assemblies.
In less than half an hour I was up and showering.
The bar of soap slippery, white, and I wondered
by what means grease was made to smell so clean.
I want to go back to the time of baths.
I want my father back—the shadow-stubble cheek
I kissed every blessed morning
before he carried off his thermos of coffee,
the lunch-pail of ham and Swiss on rye,
onion and garlic to keep up stamina, an apple
that couldn’t keep anything away.


:: Timothy Geiger, Blue Light Factory (1999)

In the Light Factory

Half-moon of sweat, small hook
of a scar, broken glass
across the burnt stone of a knuckle—
this is Standard Electric Inc.
Friday evening at 4:45.
Soon you will stop making light

after eighteen hours at the mould,
and the steady white circuit of sleep
is all that will matter.
Go home to bed, to dream
the conduit crossing another life—
beyond the surge and spark seared

against the back of your eyes—
the direct current to fortune,
an inheritance of industrial diamonds.
Monday you will rise again,
eat nothing, smoke
and recall the names

for the delicate gauges of copper
filaments, your life slipping
up a sleeve of high-tension wire,
ampere of the blue spark
that won’t stop trying
to make it all as bright as possible.

:: Timothy Geiger, Blue Light Factory (1999)