We all have tools, we all have grandmothers,
wise women who collect nickels in coin sleeves
and encourage us to save our metaphors in a box
whose lid unhinges when Pandora looks for a ten-penny nail,
a glue gun, a ball peen hammer, even a haystack
where needles hide from our frantic search for a roll
of twine around a splintered stick hidden under tape measures,
blood blisters, uncapped oil dripping into half-hearts
who have salvaged a sagging chaise from the dump.
All of us have a box full of wrenches and stripped heads, full
of splinters, sandpaper, stains, and stymies, full of trips
to adhesive aisles and lightbulb stands. Full of overalls.
We all have them, expired reward cards and debits. Unshaven
fantasies. We all dig deep in search of wood putty to hide cracks,
rifling through screws to find a knife and smooth a seam of dry rot.
We have tools, all of us, to grip the clenched fist of a foreman, duct tape
somewhere—we have it—to shut the mouth of a mad journeyman,
to pry the washer from a drain without his German curses.
In our box of tools, a lighter out of fluid, a drill without power, a sad Band-Aid—
curled ball of flesh beside a disc of resin that remembers ridicule
of a belted father, vertigo of roofs, idiot sticks, and ditches never dug
fast enough. We have in our box his brass buckle, riddled with rust and letdown.
We have his mother’s pitcher of lemonade, her print dress on the porch,
dangled strands of hair free from her bun. We have her jar of cookies.