Robert Dawson

Robert Dawson Poems

The Best Poem Of Robert Dawson

Rafters

Rafters

Hauling rafters out of Mason City
across Dakotas when no roads
paved north and south, my father
hid me in the sleeper. One haul
a detour bent us eighty miles

over chicken colored driveways.
From my dirt-green plastic plush
cranny, I stared past father's deaf
right ear, as wipers riled
the wash of country on the windshield.

Beyond the pouncing bulldog on the hood
his headlights started a face
of drops. The gravel stopped
at a corn crib. We wallowed up
the barnyard. A Swede trotted out in his shirt

lurching alongside smacking the cab
with a Ford crank. In Minot the geezer
who stacked the rafters dribbled one
on his toe. Grinning, he yanked his cuff
baring a wooden ankle in a red sock.

A Brownie Hawkeye print of then shows me
knees up on a Mack cab, blond and dour as Shelley.
The old man of Madsen and Sons snapped it
after finding my classic comic in his truck. Father
and he were pals until his outboard

struggled off our ten-foot boat and sank.
That outboard had trolled a Jap landing barge.
The Madsen boys had smuggled it through the navy
In parts lots commissioned for a jeep.
Father hired on a laundry route,
sold Hoover vacuums till our aunts gave out,
gave up and hopped up hotrods for a hotrod club.
We're sitting in a snapshot of a chopped
down Chevy chassis, whose fire wall ripped out
hides a straight-eight chromed Buick plant.

I'm driving. Willy Heilman has a boot
propped on the running board. His three-inch
studded belt ties him thin as a girl.
His hair is slick. That day at Faribault
he drove the steering column through his guts.

These pictures of this boy becoming me
frighten me. Here's one I stand in, coal
shovel and grapefruit can in hand. Beneath
corduroy overalls and orange striped shirt, I see
my body and its secrets preserved for harm.

Robert Dawson Comments