The warehouse heat seeps
Through his shirt, pushes temperature
Up like typhoid; pneumatics whirl
And presses clank steel and wood
With enough force to slam razored
Dyes into cardboard or an occasional hand.
On busy days, his ears hum
Like alarm clocks, his blue uniform
Darkens with sweat, fresh paper cuts
remap the calluses of forty years
With tributaries of blood, and his eyes
Blur with the repetition of movement,
But after each twelve-hour shift, my father
Gathers the mistakes which were a fragment
Of an inch off and folds the boxes himself,
So that he might have a memento of each
Account to display along the shelves
Of his trailer, so that he might cradle
Baseball card boxes, glazed like enamel
And hold them out to me saying:
Look Son, look.