Sweet Will

by Philip Levine

The man who stood beside me
34 years ago this night fell
on to the concrete, oily floor
of Detroit Transmission, and we
stepped carefully over him until
he wakened and went back to his press.


It was Friday night, and the others
told me that every Friday he drank
more than he could hold and fell
and he wasn’t any dumber for it
so just let him get up at his
own sweet will or he’ll hit you.


“At his own sweet will,” was just
what the old black man said to me,
and he smiled the smile of one
who is still surprised that dawn
graying the cracked and broken windows
could start us all to singing in the cold.


Stash rose and wiped the back of his head
with a crumpled handkerchief and looked
at his own blood as though it were
dirt and puzzled as to how
it got there and then wiped the ends
of his fingers carefully one at a time


the way the mother wipes the fingers
of a sleeping child, and climbed back
on his wooden soda-pop case to
his punch press and hollered at all
of us over the oceanic roar of work,
addressing us by our names and nations—


“Nigger, Kike, Hunky, River Rat,”
but he gave it a tune, an old tune,
like “America the Beautiful.” And he danced
a little two-step and smiled showing
the four stained teeth left in the front
and took another suck of cherry brandy.


In truth it was no longer Friday,
for night had turned to day as it
often does for those who are patient,
so it was Saturday in the year of ’48
in the very heart of the city of man
where your Cadillac cars get manufactured.


In truth all those people are dead,
they have gone up to heaven singing
“Time on My Hands” or “Begin the Beguine,”
and the Cadillacs have all gone back
to earth, and nothing that we made
that night is worth more than me.


And in truth I’m not worth a thing
what with my feet and my two bad eyes
and my one long nose and my breath
of old lies and my sad tales of men
who let the earth break them back,
each one, to dirty blood or bloody dirt.


Not worth a thing! Just like it was said
at my magic birth when the stars
collided and fire fell from great space
into great space, and people rose one
by one from cold beds to tend a world
that runs on and on at its own sweet will.