I was sitting in a cafeteria listening to the chatter and clatter of an incoming crowd, and the air-conditioning in the ducts began to boom, and that put me in mind of my paternal grandfather, Yeshaiya Fefferman, who was a tinsmith and worked alone in his dark shop bending, crimping and hammering sheets of galvanized iron into massive sections of ductwork, and this stanza came to me:
Huge hammer of air conditioner’s muffled thud
grandfather hammering in the dark and dirty workshop
large taciturn man, heavy shoes, heavy tread, slow, lonely work
grim and satisfied response of a large creature burrowing in the earth.
