John Henry's Hammer

I stop arguing race, and Mingus, and taxes, and Red Sox versus welfare, Macs, PC’s, best beer, and the latest war with my neighbor for there is a frame to be made. Looking around through my empty head, I guess I blank out a long time over the tools and stuff around me, then turn and stare down into a nailhead’s silvery metal circle, and find myself lost, looking like a cloud of somebody else ’s catholic prospects in my lack— the ultraviolet sunlight seeping into me, the black surplus of a bass breaking BAOOOSH BAKA BOOSH from a boombox splashing epileptic rap through the air. I watch a caterpillar, vulnerable, pus pocked on the Barberry bush beside me, hanging, as it refuses to give up becoming, balking at falling backward to its lot as larva writhing on the ground. Better to be a going-forward, I’m gon’fly if I keep this up kind of thing, even with the chemical weather out there and asthmatic descendants on the wing. The self is cheap concession, insistent “same-ole” hut in the way, blocking what’s next coming from coming: landlord warding squatters off an abandoned lot, warped legislator institutionalizing himself as upright civic center. On my knees in the driveway, I search my toolbox for a temporary blueprint, fill my hands with John Henry’s Hammer. Now I swing my blue technology— haaunh!—and hit the nailhead square so the shank makes an avenue of O’s herd through the wood where its metal is designed to go. I finish the frame, and kneel there, in the open, looking with its premise at the creatures of this world, remade like a saint by his myth.