Tinker's Damn

A pushcart in a suburb, a rag-and-bone chant, a brow of olives:
It was beyond me how a tinker found himself among these houses.
How many boulevards of new cement and mid-summer gasps
before a glass of tap water and a fistful of dull knives
ever changed hands? Desperate to charm us, he had tied ribbons
to his axles and sweat-stained jacket. And still, to keep him off her beds

of statice and marigolds, a neighbor nudged a sprinkler, made its knives
of water arc across his path. Surely he must have wondered how she lives
within: who cooks in the cool, darkened kitchens of bungalow houses?
Aprons, unsullied and starched, are folded into linens drawers, ribbons
instead of straps. Gleaming copper kettles are made cachepots to bed
the odd bromeliad; no blades to whet, nor tines to temper; no gaps

inside leaky pots, to dam up. Walkways spool between cedar ribbands
to doorsteps. The closely cropped blades of timothy, like stumpy knives
broken at the forte; curbstones and gutters, rilled with tiny leaves
brooking the sod’s run-off into sewer grates that, block after block, embed
his wheels, make him set the cart to rights, so that the neighborhood’s gasp
ushers him onward, to terminus: a road piebald with potholes and houses

whose porches are shucked of whitewash; driveways, mere beds
of crabgrass and gravel. Here, the poorer folk admired his ribbons:
a son, urged forth with an enameled cup of orangeade and, yes, the knives
to sharpen. But beyond this point, only what we called “country,” some gasps
of settlement: cedar waxwing; ambling worker bees; what was a tree house
once; jack rabbits threshing clotted fields of burdock, where none of us dare live,

and where, broken by his toil, he turned back. Years after, canyons gasp
between cactus and the honeycomb of housing tracts, and now the bad
portent of our progress flanks my freeways, amending roadmaps with ribbon-
cutting ceremonies; I grind the car’s gears to work, and spackled houses,
mouldering the valley with chalky roofs, assure me of what will outlive
siskins or scorpions in a scuttle of coastal sage. Once an architect connives

to raze their scrubby hillside, she will edge forth this margin of houses,
force the folds of land to bow down until the desert’s breath gasps
out and out. It wounds me, but who else will lie down on this bed
of neglect: I know I travel the graded country, fated to relive
this engineered loss of self—a foot upon the pedal; a wrist against the knife’s
keen point of little duties to eke out a life amid lost jobs; the blue ribbon

prize of steady work to ferry me past these ugly houses, strewn ditches. “I’ll live,”
I say—yes, but the cars gasp across overpasses, and trailers jackknife
until the mesas and all my lost, sweet riverbeds of dust, are torn to ribbons. 

© Karl J. Sherlock