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Our new series of poetry excerpts continues with a poem from the debut collection by Edgar Kunz, Tap Out. Kunz’s poems are laconic, but also remain fleshy and full—the result of detailed lines that arrive with a good deal of punch. There’s a real sense of love and loss in this layered poem; how it begins with the elegiac “There’s no one left to see his hands.” Kunz cleaves the line at the perfect moment; we can follow the sadness of that idea, or we can dig deeper and ride the rest of the poem as gets more literal. Kunz’s poetry is worth a few reads—so feel free to see the reward of both approaches.
“My Father at 49, Working the Night Shift at B&R Diesel”
There’s no one left to see his hands
lifting from the engine bay, dark and gnarled
as roots dripping river mud,
no one to see how his palms – slabs of callus
from scouring the long throats of chimneys,
hauling mortar and brick – move
in the fabricated light. Thumb-knuckle
thick and white as a grub where the box-
cutter bit. Split nail grown back
scalloped and crooked. The stitch-
puckered skin. And when they fold into and out
of themselves by the steaming faucet,
when they strip clean, the tap water
running black, then copper, then clear
into the grease-clotted drain,
there’s no one to witness the slap
of a wet rag tossed in the break-
room sink or the champ of gravel
in the empty lot. How the stars dim
as morning comes on. How a semi downshifts
on the overpass and the shop windows rattle
as it goes.
“My Father at 49, Working the Night Shift at B&R Diesel” from Tap Out: Poems by Edgar Kunz. Copyright © 2019 by Edgar Kunz. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
