Insurance Trilogy
I. Appraiser
Late afternoon I visit the body
Shop, east L.A. and hard sun
Shattered in the cluttered yard.
Mechanics gape from bays as I fiddle
With forms, loss
Sheets, ask which car it is.
The garage owner threads me back
To the total, looks sideways, through his teeth
Says this one ain’t so bad.
He’s shown me the Polaroids he has
Tacked up in the welding shed.
One shows a boy’s face laying in a bucket seat.
He stares at this one first thing
Each morning, wonders
How it got there.
This wreck is just a head-
On. I detail
What steel has done
To steel, the rending and wild stress,
Like what a mean question can do
To a person.
I take down numbers, evaluate
The paint, the windshield cracked like a web
From a bulge on the driver’s side.
In the center hangs a blonde hair-hank.
I yank the door and breathe
Hot vinyl and perfume.
Even this far in-
Land the wind is raw with salt.
I lay down my clipboard and think fast
Cars and bare beaches. I slide my hands
Out of my pockets and comb my hair.
I envision girls asleep
At the wheel.
I get back
To business. I write
Down the license tag. I hunt
For salvage.
I stand back and reckon the damage.
I take out my camera, take pictures.
II. Adjustor
The way the sun leans down on Watts
Is how a man can lean for years
Against an orange crate in a vacant lot.
I’m bickering over twenty stitches a bottle
Ripped in the Korean grocer’s ear.
He complains the way the sun leans down on Watts
Out the screen door on the dude who’s shot
Around the eyes, like me, from wanting a woman and a beer.
We slip out needy hands, draw vacant lots.
Everyone here dreams the same dream and its rotten.
If you cored the family Bible and the high school years
You’d find the pit bitten by the sun that leans on Watts.
My dreams drag me like harried cops
To take statements from old black women sheared
Of their purses, squalling hard in vacant lots.
After supper I’ll miss the deliberate way she washed the dishes. I’ll clear
The rickety table under the kitchen bulb. The light is near
The way the sun leans down on Watts
Against an orange crate in a vacant lot.
III. Restitution
I know what a leg is worth.
I know what is and isn’t the full use of a hand.
I can calculate pain and suffering,
Which man hurts and which man’s bluffing.
I’ll pay a pretty girl extra for a scar.
I drive like Jesus in a company car
All over L.A. restoring the broken with company money.
I have sheets where I can figure
The years of wages a man has lost
Because some Monday morning he misunderstood
The foreman, thought he said, let it go
Instead of, take it slow, and his hard-hat squirted
From under the concrete wall.
I’ll hand the widow the check for the wrong-
Ful death, money that will run
Out too fast in Bakersfield or Fresno.
She holds the thousands of dollars the way she might
Have held his calloused hand on a June night after supper
When the sun set late in savings time
And everything was right.