(For my father, Joseph D. Bathanti)

I was seventeen before I saw Edgar Thomson –

the steel mill where my father had worked

since he was seventeen –

and only then because I needed his car

for the senior after-prom picnic.

The theme was Color My World.

Sleepless, having danced all night,

a furnace of cheap champagne

and still in my tuxedo, I dropped him off

at 7 a.m. in Braddock,

named for a Revolutionary War general,

three bars in every block, streetlights

turned on in the afternoon so the school kids

could see their ways home through the ore dust.

The mill was blue and corrugated,

rising in shaft after shaft

of smoke that saw-toothed into gray sky.

I never saw its top.

The men in the boom crane cabs

wore hardhats and drank coffee.

They had it knocked, my father said.

But not him. He had to climb the backs

of those monsters. When I was little and insisted

I wanted to be like him and work in the mill,

he'd snap, "No, you're not. You're going to college."

In a few months I really would be

going to college. Working in a steel mill

was the last thing I wanted to do.

My father eased out of the car,

handed me a twenty, told me to be careful,

pinned on his millwright's badge

and filed into the smoke with the others.

I turned up the radio, dropped the engine

into low for torque and floored it,

sure that in one night I had had more fun,

more love, more everything than he had had in his life;

and I wanted to get back to it

as fast as I could.

From Restoring Sacred Art by Joseph Bathanti.  Used by permission of the poet and

Star Cloud Press. Copyright 2010 by Joseph Bathanti.