Those Hands

You compare your soft, untested hands to your father's as you
reach into the closet and retrieve the narrow box that holds
a warehouseman's simple economy: pay stubs and tax returns
as products of swollen knuckles, of callouses that pulled lint
from denim pockets.

Each year you would see him sitting at the maplewood table,
a puzzle of receipts and forms arranged and ordered,
the typed solemnity of their officiousness waiting for summations
carried over from bits of scrap paper.

Those hands: hungry for work as they pressed ink into the very
paper you now touch as you weigh the profit and loss
of letting the box fall into the same bin as this week's empty milk
cartons and newsprint.