It is late. I sit at a long deal table
in an upstairs cafe across from the paper
and watch the pressmen come in from their shift.
We will drink coffee for a while. Again I will think
I know why they wear those squat little hats
folded from newsprint, why they do not
take them off—then we will go.

The hats are a disguise to make themselves
pressmen, like gunnery sergeants or stevedores—
a disguise and a badge. "We are men," they say,
"who tend a machine, feet sunk in fifty-foot rock
and long as a football field, that rips words from air
as it whirrs like a saw, eats ink, tree trunks, arms."
Most have fingers missing, some have more.

One tips back his chair and tells a story about his son,
pushes the hat back on his balding head and scratches;
another tips the hat forward, tells of an argument
with his wife, as if to say, "You know how women are."
Here, at the end of their shift, they still need to wear the hats—
even as they wrap the arms of their minds around each other,
because they are men with stories they do not
entirely wish to tell.

And that is because they aren’t really pressmen at all.
One is a breaker of horses, who carries a fire in his belly
that drives him to make subjects of hammers, automobiles,
his lawn mower. Another is drunk on God. In the dark
hours away from the press, God visits him. They smoke
a calumet together, tell lies and love the lies they tell
as though they were incense drifting up from sacrifice.

The central one, he to whom others defer, will one day be buried
with his weapons. When centuries lift the broadsword from his ribs,
they will find him to have stood seven feet tall. And the small
one at the fringe of the group, the dark one who smiles a lot—
no one knows he loves a woman who sang to him once in Greek.
A luthier, he sleeps in the grain of true and high harmonics
a sheet of spruce thin as a plectrum crushed to his ear.