Down in the sunken station,

they'd reverse ten-ton green-painted trucks

till they struck with a dismal clang

against a long raised dry-land pier;

there were train tracks

that ran in someplace, but I came on at midnight

or was it eleven, I never saw the place whole,

somewhere in Long Island City

as I recall, back three decades and down

three flights of steel stairs from the street

to an immense open space, drowned in a lake of shadow

pierced by the narrow shaft of gray dock

with its yellow pools of light from hanging lamps

fixed between the fretwork iron pillars

that upheld the shed roof

 

Out on the unsheltered night-air platform

it was as cold as a meat locker,

myself crouched deep in a half-empty truck body

with the breath smoking from my nostrils,

waiting for the next load:

about once each twenty minutes an aged Irish ape

with the thick wrists, the gray-stubbled brutal strength

to which I aspired,

would appear with a handtruck or a railroad flat,

piled to toppling with freight. At once

everything was movement and bustle,

the cartons wrenched off onto the concrete floor

and then ported into the cavern-bellied trailer

in reverse order, largest first,

the two of us grunting

and hissing as we heaved the containers up,

our boots echoing on the textured metal truckbed,

the boxes slowly stacking into columns

against the booming sheet-steel walls

 

Soon he'd be off, trailing a fading scent

of sweat and Old Limerick and a vanishing rumble

of wheels, a rattle of floorboards,

from the empty flat, leaving me alone

with the chill and the lunar hush, underlined

by the doleful electric buzzing of a switchbox

and broken now and then

by muffled ambiguous sounds

far away along the pier

 

They had the real power,

it's what all the boys want,

though they try to come at it crabwise

with their fast cars and their money,

big desks of Brazilian rosewood and gilt-lettered titles

on the frosted glass, drugs in the glove compartment,

tattoos vicious or sentimental, ambassadorships,

gold-capped teeth and posse colors,

well-cut suits, ribbon-slung medals,

that cowardly handgun

 

Sometimes the men would arrive in a small gang

with a special shipment, maybe a huge motor

the size of a young rhinoceros. They'd attack it

with six-foot low-wheeled levers; cries went up

of Watch your back, kid, as I scrambled clear;

they'd turn it right round

on the expanse of oil-stained concrete,

lining it up with the truck doors

 

I studied them as I waited for the power

to descend on me in some tongue of flame,

wondering if I would ever be like them,

able to plant a bracing foot

with the ponderous authority of a draft elephant,

to reach up with a broad red-knuckled freckle-rich hand

and haul down on the lever's end, joking aside the while,

hardly even looking at the cargo,

confident as they were that the weight,

crated in metal-banded splintery wood,

hunkered down on the dock and heavy as secret sin,

must come along, docile as your old dog,

when they summoned