~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Greg Byrd

Roofing

for Mark

Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.

—    Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud-Time”

My shingle ripper bites hard into nails,
tarpaper, composition shingles.
Under the bearded Live Oak, my neighbor and I
lean to work, his calluses well-worn from carpentry,
my muscles lax from books, remembering now the old
contractions of heave and pull, lift and carry.
Sweat comes equally to men in Florida sun
and so we work quietly and heave
weathered sheets of roofing over eaves,
our spadelike tools working like shovels in hard dirt.

It is the sort of job that many a strong man says
“yeah, I reroofed my house—once!”
And we cherish hard work the way
only a man who has other skills can.
Mark can pick up his Skilsaw, level, nail gun,
and never have to see the top of a roof again.
I have my own tools, too: 
books on which I learned to put a true edge
words I learned to use like joints
long ago when the choice was unloading trucks
or going to school, when sweat made cheap beer
taste better than any martini.
In high school summers I knew forty year old men
whose joints creaked from too much lifting,
whose workweek was five days’ sentence of labor
punctuated by a paycheck only as strong as a semicolon.

So Mark looked at me and I looked back
when the man in the old green pickup
asked if we needed a hand.
He was a professional roofer—he said—and carried
his handmade tools up the ladder
even when I told him I could not pay.
“I just want to get some sweat in” he said
as he set to, ripping under tarpaper and shingle
pulling both sets of nails up at once
working half as hard as either of us,
moving twice as fast.   But sweat costs money
so I said again “I don’t have the money to pay you”
but he only talked about sweat
and showed us his technique, a virtuoso
sitting in with a second-rate band.
He had the better claim on the job, it’s true,
honest sweat for good money. But we,
we were building a house, blending our sweat,
lending our labor to each others’ homes,
making roofs that would stand for twenty years
against our own kinds of weather.

Greg Byrd is the winner of the 2018 Robert Phillips Chapbook prize from the Texas Review Press.  His poems have appeared in his book Salt and Iron (Snake Nation Press) and also in Louisville Review, South Florida Poetry Journal,  Puerto del Sol, Tampa Review, Cortland Review, among others.  He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, and an Individual Artist Grant from Creative Pinellas.  Greg teaches writing and literature at St. Petersburg College.