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Working in the Garage, Late Summer

Like the heart, carburetors are nothing,
just pumps with a bit of lung function added--fuel-to-air mixture
as important as gas-to-spark.  Removed

from the car and laid out on a skirt
of newspaper, a puddle of unleaded spreading
from an intake valve, they seem complicated as a plastic model
or a relationship.  The MG forlorn

fifteen feet away. The worklamp swings from its gallowed cord,
its glare filling that pool of fuel with momentary signatures
of the spectrum while outside the air thickens with approaching

autumn as it does annually: students in askew lines of laughter
and gossip await encroaching school buses; neighbors begin
to share their gardens' harvests.  Still I can't help

thinking the leaves made a thicker shag over the sidewalk
years back, and that the smoke which rose in spirograph designs
from small backyard fires roasted the air for miles
and promised comfort or at least warmth

which eventually vanished with a plethora of snow.
I know now a promise is a fenced in perimeter
bound by sentences, and how sentences are composed
of words which are, in the end, mostly space
and empty, and incapable, therefore, of holding anything in

or anything out.   And maybe that's why Jack trusted nothing

but the grease beneath his fingernails each fall
for those four years in Westchester when I'd drive whatever
jalopy I owned onto one of the lifts in his shop,
and together we'd check for oil leaks, patch
ruptured mufflers, turn brakes, whatever needed

to be done, late.  His wife waiting at home for him
which he never mentioned.  Silence
and toil our bond while skies darkened along with our hands.

He would want this roadster ready:

not even September and the maples
already metamorphing, although its all trick light
and photosynthesis, as evening becomes the color
of tarnished sockets.  I've no rush

with this task of needles, gaskets, nuts and jets--
a delicate surgery of little urgency but for the coming pleasure
of autumn drives with the roof down and the later possibility
of returning to the car where a pair of orange leaves might be resting
on the passenger seat, lovely as any woman I've loved.
 

--Gerry

© Gerry LaFemina 1998

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