Vise jaws from the days when Joe DiMaggio swung a Yankee bat

The new manager of our factory has ordered us to clean up our shop floor
and we machinists
are dropping things into the steel barrels on wheels we use for chips and scrap metal
pieces of obsolete covered-in- dust-and-oil machines paint brushes last wielded the day
the hula hoop was invented set screws
sawed-in-half pipes coils of baling wire weird pieces of long-gone fixtures
but as I drop steel drawbars and machine stops from before WW1 CLUNK into a scrap barrel
I don’t want to throw out Casey’s smile
from that aircraft factory we worked in 35 years ago before America moved all its jobs overseas
and we workers had the world by the tail
I don’t want to throw out Warren
who taught me only I could make myself a master machinist
37 years ago when I first set hands on a machine
and as I drop old gouged vise jaws from the days when Joe DiMaggio swung a Yankee bat
into a barrel full of steel ribbons and think of all the men now under grass
who once bolted those jaws into vises
I don’t want to throw out Vincente’s magic whistle
that could light up a football-field-big factory with enough joy
to fill 100 men’s hearts even though those men were covered in dirt and sweat
broken crescent wrench
Champ the ex-boxer talking about how he used to drink blood
before each fight
old dusty steel shafts with rusty threads
the twinkle
in Ivan’s eye as he told me in his broken English how he kissed the earth under his feet
the day he left Russia for good and set foot
on American soil Al’s Hank Williams yodel
an empty can of WD-40 oil Harman’s
long bow-legged cowboy stride as he walked his 100-foot-long spar mill
in his 3-foot-high rubber boots with 2 shots of whiskey in him
at 7 am
bent C-clamps twisted bolts gears missing from machines long melted down into scrap iron
the way Gus
used to growl, “God damn son of a bitch!” 50 times each night
as blast furnace flame licked his face
rusty cutting edges dust-coated taps forged
before the first mushroom cloud filled the sky the worm scars
Tibor’s knife left across the veins in his wrist on his last drunken skid row binge
before he set down the bottle
and picked up a machine handle
I’ll throw wrenches and bolts and gears and set screws and paintbrushes away
but as long as I can still push this poet’s pen across this paper
I will never toss one human being
into a scrap barrel.