Poetry by Peter Schmitt

Peter Schmitt is the author of six collections of poems, including Goodbye, Apostrophe (Regal House). He has also edited and written the introduction for his late father's Pan Am Ferry Tales: A World War II Aviation Memoir (McFarland). He lives and teaches in his hometown of Miami, Florida.

Work Clothes

For 40 years my father wore
the same, functional clothes to work,
a white, short-sleeve, button-down shirt
and khaki pants—a uniform
allowing him, although he owned
the packing plant, to move among
his employees like one of them—
his foremen, mostly hardscrabble
Southerners with heavy toolbelts
and steel-toed boots, and the Cuban
and Black working men and women
in bright yellow waders. He knew
their eighty names, and families;
many stayed with him for decades.

When the cannery finally
failed, equipment sold at auction—
the last small local plant to close—
he was 72, with no
intent or desire to retire.
But someone in the school system
looked the other way, offered him
(once the boss, now an applicant)
a new job, at a middle school
five days a week with the title
Occupational Specialist
(a fancy term for job counselor).
And now, really for the first time
he dressed like an executive:

and my mother relished the chance
to buy him smart new suits and ties
and each morning she’d see him off
impeccably turned out, looking
every inch the professional,
as if he might hire his students
before teaching them anything.
The neighborhood was dangerous
and some would never see high school,
would be gone from those halls the day
they turned 16 or long before.
But others would try and he worked
to learn the talents that could best
equip them, diploma or not.

And he seemed to know where clothes fit
in holding someone’s attention,
in earning respect and speaking
to a pride in appearances.
He was well-tailored for those kids
who might wear the same shirts and shorts
for weeks and shoes with holes but dream
of something more someday, more than
the one good suit or dress they owned
reserved for church and funerals.
When the last bell rang he would hang
his jacket in the back seat, wave
to the kids leaving, not loosen
his tie till he drove out of sight.

Carolina Wren

Before we launched this morning, from beneath
a kayak seat shot twigs, pine straw, Spanish moss—
and two fledglings, banging off the footrests

and smacking the hatch, frantic, until they hopped out
and testing their wings struggled to reach knee-height
in spurts like the Wrights at Kitty Hawk…And I

thought of your daughter’s news yesterday that she’s
pregnant, how thrilled she should be if not convinced
that two healthy pours of Chardonnay weeks back

had damaged the small thing that she carried—
and now she was like the mother wren, all
agitation—as suddenly one more nestmate,

the runt, poked out, mouth agape, quivering,
and just as quickly retreated below
the seat, trapped in the shell of the boat…

What would she think, your child, your worrier,
to know we set out anyway, come what may,
deciding to ride the tides and weather

while we could, sky blue as a drugstore test strip,
extra passenger in tow—how you claimed
the seat above the nest (a mother-bird

yourself), delicate cargo suspended
between you and the still water, floating
above the estuary like Moses

in the basket, mute, the only sounds our strokes
and the drops easing off the paddles, its small
heart shaken by sensations not many

of its kind had likely known…But not a sign
until our prow at last scraped the landing
and a peep…faint…but soon less so, and as we

dragged the kayak back up the bank answering
now the mother, and our cleansing hose must
have seemed no more than the briefest cloudburst

or the brush of arriving, familiar wings.