Alex Martin - Philo Meets the Machine

4. Philo Meets the Machine

“An awful lot of peddlers roamed around back then.
Mammy’d put ’em up for days at a time.
Them and them hellfire and brimstone preachers.
They set up a commissary over at the Quarry,
I had my first paying job, over thar,
running the steam horse.
I hung around the store
during lunch hour…

“Seemed like everybody in the world’d come in ’nar,
and they’d all be a-talking.
I don’t know how I got along before that.
Yessir. That was my roundup of the daily news.

“Hunting, fishing, crops, jokes, gossip, tall tales.
I’d set on the steps and listen.

“But oh, the sharpest, sweetest smells come out that door...
Soap, leather, liquorice, cheese, ham, apples, varnish…

“I was just a boy and I didn’t know much,
but they was more things in that one place
than ever I suspected.

“And all of it new…

“Mmmmmm… And I’d take it all in—
with my slice of cheese, my nickel’s worth of crackers—
(break) and a bottle of pop!

“They even had a machine, back again’ the back wall,
that would take your measure.
And I don’t mean height or weight.
It wasn’t your strength even ’xactly.
Ye’d drop in your penny and squeeze
And it’d test ye.

“It’d tell you how much juice ye could take…”

He drops in his imaginary penny, he lifts his arms, and grips the handles.
They’re spaced wide apart, for a boy,
and trembling with the juice, the current…

The shock of childhood, with no insulation:
on a raw mountain: with a demented father:
in poverty past imagining.

“Yessir. That machine was like lie-f…

“The harder you worked it, the more it’d get ye!

“Well. I could stand right much—more’n most I reckon—
but I had to let go, at lay-st…”

He smiles, and the great hands float between us, like falling leaves.
Like wide wings, drifting down—flattening, to rest, on his knees:
like a pair of ancient raptors, gliding home to roost,
on familiar limbs, across a holler.