'He Signs His Name in Sparks'

By trade my father was an ironworker for the City of Cleveland’s Municipal Light, always called “Muny Light." At home he was a welder, specializing in wrought-iron railings. His aesthetic sense could be summarized in a single word: big. Or heavy. Everything he built was oversized. Steel and iron were always preferable to aluminum or wood. When I was collecting butterflies he built a display case for me out of galvanized sheet metal, large enough to hold perhaps forty pinned specimens. It must have weighed fifty pounds. 

In the garage he had the equipment for both oxyacetylene and arc welding. The latter drew enough electricity to melt iron and dim all the lights in the house. That’s how we knew what kind of work he was doing. His body was covered with small wounds from the sparks. They would bleed, leaving red dots on the bed sheets. His work clothes were perforated with tiny holes. I never learned to weld. Not being handy, always feeling awkward with tools, was my passive protest.

 

Len Krisak is better known as a translator, especially of Latin verse and Rilke, but he’s a fine  poet in his own right. I happened on “Welder,” originally published in the March 2000 issue of The English Journal:

 

“This spear of light ignites a blade whose flame

 Is so intense the night relents around

 It: this is what he cuts the junker’s frame

 With, slicing through the steel that marks the ground

 With one gigantic X. He signs his name

 In sparks right on the spot, a dotted line

 So hot that specks of fire spit upon

 The darkness, arcing out. Their spite designs

 The black surround, and then . . . his torch is gone.

 As for the dying-down acetylene,

 The oxygen whose bottled force goes dead,

 This welder wrenches shut the one that’s green

 And throttles down the other that was red.

 His visor up, he walks away, unseen.”