Friday night I entered a dark corridor

rode to the upper floors with men who filled

the stainless elevator with their smell.



Did you ever make a crystal garden, pour salt

into water, keep pouring until nothing more dissolved?

A landscape will bloom in that saturation.



My daddy's body shop floats to the surface

like a submarine. Men with nibblers and tin snips

buffing skins, sanding curves under clamp lights.



I grew up curled in the window of a 300 SL

Gullwing, while men glided on their backs

through oily rainbows below me.



They torqued lugnuts, flipped fag ends

into gravel. Our torch song

had one refrain--oh the pain of loving you.



Friday nights they'd line the shop sink, naked

to the waist, scour down with Ajax, spray water

across their necks and up into their armpits.



Babies have been conceived on sweat alone--

the buttery scent of a woman's breast,

the cumin of a man. From the briny odor



of black lunch boxes--cold cuts, pickles,

waxed paper--my girl flesh grows.

From the raunchy fume of strangers.