Fresh Brick

for Klaipéda, Lithuania

The young man’s hands with gloves feed two middle-aged men

laying brick into a sidewalk. He is not tired of wheeling the barrow

full of cement rectangles to the ungloved fingers

laying brick into sidewalk. He is not soft,

but his girlfriend is.

A hammer-drill pecks off granules from around a manhole –

two other men lay the border with beveled cement blocks in meter-long sections –

the man hammer drilling frazzles at the pace, removes the glove

from his trigger finger, tries something different. The manhole

stays in place, not tired, ungloved, waiting to be opened.

Two other men gray as the day above them, endeavor to use a Cat

of Lithuanian lineage to excise a pile of old brick, aggregate and lumber.

Their pace as slow as those laying new sidewalk. The young tree, beaten

for years, will stay.

And an old woman watches closely.

She is the old Russia, stern as a ship rusting in harbor,

she is almost as large, eyes the two chipping around the manhole,

belittles the two laying brick, coddles the one with the soft girlfriend.

From her slow circle in the middle of it all she watches everyone

including her neighbors

who lean from new windows, stand across the street, stand

in the street, all of us watching the old way

new bricks get laid.

titled after Justin DeGarmo’s painting of the same name,
which he created in response to an earlier version of this then-untitled poem
(as part of Platform Gallery’s Winter 2006 collaborative installation, “Show & Tell”)