Best Poems - Work

“FIRST STANDS the lofty Washington,
That noble, great, immortal one.
The elder Adams next we see,
And Jefferson comes number three;
Then Madison is fourth you know,
The fifth one on the list, Monroe;
The sixth, then Adams comes again,
And Jackson seventh in the train.
Van Buren eighth upon the line
And Harrison counts number nine.
The tenth is Tyler in his turn,
And Polk the eleventh, as we learn.
The twelfth is Taylor in rotation,
The thirteenth Fillmore in succession;
The fourteenth. Pierce, has been selected,
Buchanan, fifteenth is elected;
Sixteenth, Lincoln rules the nation;
Johnson, seventeenth, fills the station;
As the eighteenth Grant two terms serves;
Nineteenth, Hayes our honor preserves;
Twentieth, Garfield becomes our head;
Twenty-first, Arthur succeeds the dead;
Then Cleveland next was selected;
Twenty-third, Harrison’s elected;
Twenty-fourth, Cleveland is recalled;
Twenty-fifth, McKinley twice installed;
Twenty-sixth, Roosevelt, strenuous, firm;
Taft, twenty-seventh, serves his term;
Twenty-eighth, Wilson holds the place,
A nation’s problems has to face.”

“At the dinner table, my brother says something
Republican he knows I will hate.
He has said it only for me, hoping
I will rise to the argument as I usually do
so he can call me ‘communist’
and accuse me of terrible things—not loving
the family, hating the country, unsatisfied
with my life. I feel my fingers tighten 
on my fork and ask for more creamed potatoes
to give me time to think.

He’s right: It’s true I am not satisfied
with life. Each time I come home
my brother hates me more for the life
of the mind I have chosen to live.
He works in a factory and can never understand
why I am paid a salary for teaching poetry
just as I can never understand his factory job
where everyone loves or hates the boss like god.
He was so intelligent as a child
his teachers were scared of him.
He did everything well and fast
and then shot rubberbands at the girls’ legs
and metal lunchboxes lined up neatly beneath the desks.
Since then, something happened I don’t know about.
Now he drives a forklift every day.
He moves things in boxes from one place
to another place. I have never worked
In a factory and can only imagine
the tedium, the thousand escapes
the bright mind must make.

But tonight I will not fight again.
I just nod and swallow and in spite
of everything remember my brother as a child.
When I was six and he was five, I taught him everything
I learned in school each day while we waited for dinner.
I remember his face—smiling always,
the round, brown eyes, and how his lower lip
seemed always wet and ready to kiss.
I remember for a long time his goal in life
was to be a dog, how we were forced
to scratch his head, the pathetic sound 
of his human bark. Now he glowers
and acts like a tyrant and cannot eat
and thinks I think
I am superior to him.

The others ignore him as they usually do:
My mother with her bristly hair.
My father just wanting to get back to the TV.
My husband rolling his eyes in a warning to me.

It has taken a long time to get a politics
I can live with in a world that gave me
poetry and my brother an assembly line.
I accept my brother for what he is
and believe in the beauty of work
but also know the reality of waste,
the good minds ground down through circumstance
and loss. I mourn the loss of all I think
he could have been, and this is what he feels,
I guess, and cannot face and hates me
for reminding him of what is gone and wasted
and won’t come back.

For once, it’s too sad to know all this.
So I give my brother back his responsibility
or blandly blame it all on sociology,
and imagine sadly how it could have been different,
how it will be different for the son I’ll bear.
And how I hope in thirty years he’ll touch
his sister as they touched as children
and let nothing come between the blood they share.”