The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano
by B.H. Fairchild, The Art of the Lathe

The brown wrist and hand with its raw knuckles and blue nails
packed with dirt and oil, pause in mid-air, the fingers arched delicately,

and she mimics him, hand held just so, the wrist loose,
then swooping down to the wrong chord.
She lifts her hand and tries again.

Drill collars rumble, hammering the nubbin-posts.
The helper lifts one, turning it slowly,
then lugs it into the lathe’s chuck.

The bit shears the dull iron into new metal, falling
into the steady chant of lathe work,
and the machinist lights a cigarette, holding

in his upturned palms the polonaise he learned at ten,
then later the easiest waltzes,
etudes, impossible counterpoint

like the voice of his daughter he overhears one night
standing in the backyard. She is speaking
to herself but not herself, as in prayer,

the listener is some version of herself,
and the names are pronounced carefully,
self-consciously: Chopin, Mozart,

Scarlatti., . . . these gestures of voice and hands
suspended over the keyboard
that move like the lathe in its turning

toward music, the wind dragging the hoist chain, the ring
of iron on iron in the holding rack.
His daughter speaks to him one night,

but not to him, rather someone created between them,
a listener, there and not there,
a master of lathes, a student of music.

Alice James' books says, "B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe (1998) is a collection of poems covering a wide range of subjects, though it centers on the working-class world of the Midwest, the isolations of small-town life, and the possibilities and occasions of beauty and grace among the machine shops and oil fields of rural Kansas."