By Susan Eisenberg
Everything you thought you knew
must be relearned overnight.
How to walk.
Walk, not trip, over cords, 2x4s
used coffee cups, concrete cores.
Walk, 40 pounds on your shoulder, across
rebar or a wood plank; glide,
not wobble, not look like the bounce
beneath each bootstep scares you.
How to dress yourself
to work outdoors all day midwinter
and keep warm, keep working, fingers moving;
or midsummer, with no hint of breasts.
How to climb ladders–
not a stepstool or a 4-footer–
ladders that stretch up two stories
where someone’s impatient
for that bundle of pipe.
How to get coffee–hot and how they like it–to a crew
spread out 10 floors; to carry muffins
three blocks in a paper sack
through sheets of rain.
How to look.
To never go back empty-handed
when you’re told, Grab me a This/That
from the gangbox, if all you’ve done
is move things around, poke here and there;
if you haven’t emptied out the full contents
so the journeyman won’t shame you
by finding This/That in a quick minute,
after you’ve said, We don’t have any.
How to be dependable
but not predictable-provokable.
Not the lunch break entertainment.
How to read
blueprints,
delivery orders,
the mood on the job;
how long it’s okay to sit down for coffee;
how early you can start rolling up cords.
How to do well in school
from the back row
of a seats-assigned-Jim-Crow classroom
How to learn tricks-of-the-trade
from someone who does not like you.
How to listen, to act-don’t-ask.
To duck when someone motions, Duck!
Or when someone tells you, Don’t talk to Zeke,
to know what they mean
so you don’t even look at Zeke, the ironworker who’s always first out,
last in, standing there, so four times a day–
start, lunch, quit–all the workers walk past him,
like a sandbar, waves washing back and forth,
that catches debris.
How to pick up the phone and call your friend,
the only one of the women not at class
the night the apprenticeship director met you all
at the door
carrying the nervous rumor
that one of the women had been raped
and you all look at each other
and it wasn’t any of you five.
How to respond–within protocol–
when someone takes your ladder or tools,
imitates your voices on the loudspeaker,
spraypaints Cunt on your Baker staging,
urinates in your hardhat,
drives to your home
where you live alone
with your daughter
and keys your truck parked
in your own driveway.
Later, you’ll need the advanced skills:
how–without dislodging the keystone–
to humiliate a person, how to threaten
a person. Deftly.
So no one’s certain for absolute
that’s what happened. Not even you.
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