Jackhammers by Ed Aust

Jackhammers

These men in my neighbor’s backyard
slick with sweat, hunched over jackhammers
demolishing a concrete slab
dark currents run through them
hydraulic hoses coil at their feet
like blue snakes as they
pulverize stone into aggregate

and I’m back in that dust-covered orchard
late summer ‘75
my first and last day on the job
sorting peaches on the platform
of a twelve-ton tractor they call
the Trunk Shaker
careening through the tight tree rows
clamping the trunks with giant pincers
and rattling the peaches off their branches

and down rain the ripe peaches
and down storms the debris
of dust and twigs and fruit fuzz
and down cascades leaves and bugs
and bird nests
that roll onto the rubber conveyer
in the sweltering August heat
as I cough exhaust
and absorb the machine’s shock waves
and dodge the whipping branches
and sidestep the deadly trunks
and toss away the bad fruit
and swat away the stink bugs
and wipe the sweat from my eyes
and for ten hours straight
I try to stay alive
to get those peaches in
before they rot

all that day I rehearse the words
I will tell the foreman, Sorry,
I can’t come back, I can’t work on Sundays,
which is a lie and of course he knows it
but he pays me my day’s wage
and lets me go in silence

and from my bedroom window now I watch
as fine dust rises from the mens’ pneumatic chisels
settles on their work boots like sifted flour
as behind dust masks they shout
in exhausted words I can’t understand
and I know they’ll be back tomorrow
and the next day and the next
to finish the job
as I finish folding my laundry
and set my shirts into their quiet drawers

*

Ed Aust lives in Oakland, California. His poems have appeared in The MacGuffin, Avocet, Coal City Review, California Quarterly, Stonecoast Review, The Reed, Watershed, Algebra of Owls, and San Francisco Bay Guardian.