Five roofers are wedging off the old,
scraping it over the edge. Great black birds
diving in front of the window.
In another place, a nail gun goes off in patterns
of four, sometimes five. They’re nice guys:
one has a funny beard that sticks
straight out, one has a lip ring. One is pounding,
testing for rot. One is flipping sections of shingles
down; I hear them slap like clown’s feet,
something out of Shakespeare. They know
what they’re doing and they do it,
great rolls of thunder, the roof
of heaven cluttered with gods: Homer’s
Tityus, Leto, Tantalus, the ones
who work the obscure jobs, who come
when called, the ones before Milton’s great-
voiced dignitary, before Hopkins’ rod bearer,
the ones from the old days, from my old days,
when over my head, there was music
in the air, the pitch of my church-camp voice,
raised out of the heat and the breeze
and the sun on the spillway rocks, all of it
holding me in as if I were in a shadow-box,
the kind someone looks through
a peephole and everything is 3-D, so the eye
is like the Important God. It fills me
with tenderness, the little world I had going on
inside, my grief that it was not the world.