Beyond the Tinkerer's Purview

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Beyond the Tinkerer’s Purview 


But then, despite his swelling shed

of tailored tools and know-

how, there’s all the shattered

things to which he brings 

just two eyes like liquid nails 

to a job with no backing 

to bond, useful as the guy 

who turns off the water

for the plumber then sits by 

crunching little peanuts

of small talk about the Braves.    


Like lunch with the student 

stirred to pour out what’s backed up 

since dad’s slow-drip descent 

to the guest room, or

the way he cannot stop the light 

from revealing to his kids 

all the painted-over places. 


And then that breaking

news, the one about the next-door town 

on the other end of the world 

who lost its daughters to the blast

of an errant missile. He went home 

and tore up his shed but there was nothing

he could find to twist a nut 

on the live wire of such 

a severing, no one to teach him how

to put a declarative end-point

on the shrapnel of a whole school

of girls dying before their periods, 


like so many fragments insisting

to run on and on and on

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