At The Reunion, Joe The Hammer Buys Me A Beer

When you’re
a hammer, he said to me,
everything looks like a nail,
and that’s how you approach
every problem:
sometimes you drive it in,
sometimes you pull it out.

I wish, a lot of the time, he said,
that I’d been born
a precision screwdriver.
I wish I’d been made for details,
been a writer like you.  But I wasn’t.
I was a hammer. I did
framing twenty years,
had my own business the last ten.
I slammed
and yanked and banged my thumb
a lot.  I never did the painting
and wallpapering, though I did drywall
when I had to,
never liked having to finish things
the way others wanted them, I figured
that was their job.

You, he said, you got
to do all the cool stuff,  you got
to write and travel,
make stuff up, fine tune
and change things
a little bit here and there.
 
No complaints,
he said, I just wonder sometimes
what it would have been like,
so what’s it like?

And the Hammer
slapped me on the back

as I peeled the label
off the bottle
and studied
my nervous,
unmarked hands.