Listening to the machinery of poetry

I haven't talked to my dad in nearly ten years, a fact I state not to gain sympathy nor to shock you nor to provoke revulsion but to remind myself that even after that much time, it's still possible to have new insights. The differences between us were always great -- our interests, our temperaments, the things we valued, how we spent our time -- so great, in fact, that for most of my life we've been little more than acquaintances. He's never shown much interest in what I do, and his unwillingness even to pretend that acting like a father was or is important is still impossible for me to forgive. However, I have eventually come to see him in a slightly different light for a couple of reasons: first, because we now live over 1,200 miles apart, he in Minnesota and I in Texas; and second, because during the past few years I've spent a lot of time reading, teaching, and writing poetry, something I believed he never understood.
Dad hired my older brother Ken and me, along with Frank Baumann, a large man near 70 who always smelled like he was two days late for a bath, to help with custom corn shelling during summers when I was in high school. Many area farmers picked corn on the ear in the fall, stored it in cribs through the winter, and when corn prices rose the next summer, hired Dad to bring his sheller and haul the shelled corn to the elevator in town. When someone like Omar Jenniges north of Lamberton called on Sunday evening, we left early Monday morning and drove the six miles of gravel township roads to his farm. Frank rode with Dad in one of the grain trucks, Ken drove the other truck, and I drove the Super M, an International with a wide front end, a round metal seat on springs, and the sheller hooked behind. When we arrived, we unloaded the drag line along the length of the wooden crib, assembled it, and attached it to the sheller. Then, we parked a wagon under the cob elevator and a truck under the auger, attached the power-take-off shaft to the PTO on the tractor, swung the husk blower away from the crib, and waited for Dad to hit every zerk with the grease gun and all the drive chains on the sheller with an oil can. When he finished, he climbed on the tractor, stepped in the clutch, engaged the PTO, opened the throttle about half way, and let the clutch out. The shaft began to spin, and the machine came to life -- gears turning chains, the blower giving off a low howl of wind, the shaker at the rear slightly rocking the machine forward and back, and the cob elevator turning empty on the narrow track to the waiting wagon.
Gradually Dad opened the throttle all the way until the tractor roared and the sheller clattered and shook. He climbed down from the International, walked between the sheller and the truck parked under the auger, and watched and listened as he moved toward the still dragline and the shade of the crib where we waited. He looked at Frank, who leaned on the wooden handle of the hook, a fork with four tines bent perpendicular to the handle. They nodded to one another, and Dad pulled the lever that threw the dragline in gear. We opened the crib in two places, and since the corn -- hard and slick from months of drying -- ran like water, we held it back with our hooks. Gradually the flow lessened and we scraped it out of the opening of the crib, pulling the ears into the dragline. The turning of gears and the tense knuckling of chain over metal, rubbed to a silver shine by the weight of corn and iron, pulled it to the incline that lifted the corn six feet and dropped it into the brawl of metal and moving parts.
The sheller, a primitive contraption -- like poetry -- made of a combination of all the basic machines -- lever, wheel, screw, gear, pulley, and incline plane -- separated an ear of corn into its component parts. Pale husks roared out of the blower into a heap on the ground where they saucered the other leaves like water rushing from a hose into a pail; a thick stream of yellow kernels of dry corn poured from the auger into the wooden box of the old blue grain truck on the near side; and cobs, red like hands scrubbed raw in hot water, tipped and tumbled and rolled off the end of the narrow elevator into a wagon on the far side of the sheller. Everything went its own direction, the machine sorting it all out in some mysterious way in its shaking, howling bowels. From a distance the entire assembly must have looked like a dragon creeping and snorting out of the cool shade of the corncrib, the dragline its tail, the sheller its body, and the International tractor out front its smoking, roaring head. The tractor engine bore the load and under full throttle gave off a packed sound, which mixed with the howl of the blower, the scrape and click of chain, the thud and tumble of ears into the dark shaker at the rear of the machine, and the hum of the wide belt driven by a flat iron wheel at the top the of the back of the sheller.
Dad stood where the dragline poured into the incline and near the lever that, when pulled out against the tension of a spring and hooked by its teeth on a frame of angle iron, threw it all into gear, pulling the corn
away from Frank outside the crib and, as the crib emptied, Ken and me inside. Dad watched that corn fed steadily into the sheller, that the hopper at the base of the elevator incline didn't overflow, that the machine did not need him. Most days he worked hard, especially in the morning, hooking, sliding a scoop shovel deftly over the grass to pick up the kernels rattled loose beneath the hopper, climbing the side of the truck and swinging the auger to the front to level the load, aiming the tip of an oil can at the gears, or, as if operating a bellows, opening and closing the arm of a grease gun pushed firmly onto a zerk in a shaft.
But mostly he listened to the machine as I now try to listen to poems. In the midst of all the noise there was a right and a wrong to its sound, and it was his ability to recognize that contrast, to distinguish a change in pitch or the frequency of thumping or the looseness of a rattle that could be the difference between pausing for fifteen minutes to replace a belt or a link in a chain or shutting down the entire operation for two hours to pull a gear or replace a bearing or a scored shaft. He stood with a cigarette jammed in the fork of two fingers of his right hand and his left braced on the top of the shovel handle against his hip and watched the pitching of corn in the dragline. When he turned his eyes toward us, he was not watching us but shifting his ear to sort out a sound from the machine, testing it, making sure it was right. He stood still, staring, and then turned to look where a moment ago it was only the sound that concerned him. Sometimes he touched it, quieting the vibration of a chain guard or checking the temperature of a spinning part with his hand held near it. And still at other times he smelled it, trying to locate the source of a sulphurous whiff of hot rubber or a metallic odor that meant a fast shut-down.
He stood amid the noise that drowned out our voices -- the roar of the machinery, the scratching of hooks on the wood floor of the crib, the occasional whomp of a shovel swung at a scurrying rat, the banging of ear corn against the metal sides of the dragline. Then there was the frightening moment when he dropped his shovel and threw the lever to disengage the drag line and elevator incline and ran -- a thing he almost never did -- between the sheller and truck to the tractor where he leaped to the drawbar, swung the throttle down, and shut off the PTO. Frank, Ken, and I stood -- our hooks and scoop shovels still -- and turned to see what had happened. If the cause of his running was simple and the problem clear, he moved to the tool box fastened on the right side of the tractor near the motor and returned with a screwdriver, hammer, or end wrench. If it was worse or if he only knew something was wrong but didn't know what, he stepped from the drawbar and walked to the sheller, looking, touching, smelling, while we listened to the quiet around us and the sudden, strange clarity of our own voices.
The smooth running of the sheller was poetry to my father, listening attentively was how he read it, and the adjustments and repairs were revision and editing. I see now that his attentiveness to the machine -- if not to his own children -- and his ability to listen carefully to it as he did during those long ago summers is not so different from what I try to do today as a teacher and writer.

(Randy Koch teaches creative writing and English composition at Laredo Community College, and is editor of LCC's La Frontera arts journal.)