This poem remembers a father through the machinery of addiction, smoke, and immigrant grief. The garage becomes a site of private mythology, where beer bottles and broken language form the altar of a man both destructive and deeply wounded. Rather than offering easy forgiveness or condemnation, the poem asks what it means to inherit a father’s doubt as intimately as his love, and to recognize how grief can become a theology of its own.
Kelpe, Paul. Machinery (Abstract #2). 1933–1934. Oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor.
