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In the dark, the green light glows from my father’s radio. Outside, rain, and the sound of rain under 18 wheels. Along the highway, the truckers speak to each other in long all night drawls of almost finished sentences. I think the voice of the midnight universe is always vaguely southern: West Virginia, North Carolina, Shiloh, Vicksburg, moving on up all the way to Cleveland, and down to some great swamp where dead cedars rise, where a Heron barely stirs. I am thinking how pain calcifies in the heart, how great cathedrals in the cave of someone’s closed eyes are being formed—drop by drop, on the lime stone walls of trout streams, in the caves of Kentucky, all the way through to Pennsylvania. Is a man alone, stretched out upon the pallet of his bed? Is he ever less than a landscape, an outcropping of rocks, voices, wires, the sharp elbows of waitresses at 3 am? No one reduces me save business as usual and if you have enough time, my father said, enough time to swallow your own spit, you might hear the universe speaking to you—its endless patter, its voice in the stones, a great rock along 81 south whose silence is song. Do not trust the junkies of that more civil silence. They are loud with their serenity, but the violent bear it away—the trucks moving along the highway in the rain. When my mother died I crept into his room, his head down, and cradled in his hands. Long ago, and long ago, and long ago, and long ago. Grief, don’t let me know you cheaply. I put my arms around you—and I am not afraid.
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Joe Weil was born and raised in the industrial city of Elizabeth, New Jersey and worked for over 20 years as a tool maker and chief shop steward (Teamsters local 190). During this time, he read and wrote poetry constantly, becoming active on the New Jersey poetry scene as a host of the Baron art center readings, founder/editor of Black Swan review, and in several other ventures around Newark and Manhattan. Weil’s work often deals with the ghosts of the urban rust belt, with factory workers, and the people he knew growing up. Harvey Pekar, in an introduction to Weil’s A Portable Winter, said of his poetry: “Joe Weil’s Elizabeth reminds me of my Cleveland… I like Joe’s precision of language, his insights… on the strength of that I recommend his work to you.” Martin Jude Farawell, director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry program and festival, writes of Weil: Joe Weil is as gifted a technician of the free verse line as any poet of his generation, with an impeccable ear for building melodies and rhythms out of the natural contours of common speech.” Weil is the author of three chapbooks, and three full length books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Plumber’s Apprentice (New York Quarterly Books, 2009). He teaches graduate and undergraduates at Binghamton University, and is married to the poet, Emily Vogel.
