The Ash of You (for Philip Levine)

When you spoke of melting

pig iron into steel,

pneumatic pressed sheets

into car quarter panels,

you mouthed the words

with your thirsty hands.

Other poets only ever imagined

what you’d lived –

the poverty, the desertion,

the bitter, biting winters

you’d worked through –

the lines you penned

to honor those

who could never lift one,

despite the heft of shoulders,

the hungry bones of backs.

You were never born of ash –

it was always too clean,

too burned of its impurities

in the foundry blaze.

No, you learned to write in the muck,

to make stick make pen make word

make world make life make belief

make escape.

And when the immaculate poets

bleach their shirts for the honor

of returning you to your dust,

force them to burn

you in your first furnace,

to push you through

your factory smokestack,

and puff you out

upon the men you’d tried

to uplift, to preserve, to embalm.

Should the workers breathe in enough,

maybe the ash of you

will console

their cancers,

will convince

whatever’s eating them

from within

to work itself out.