Iron.The mouth closes on the word like a vice. I served the apprenticeship before I knewwhose element was passing through my hands.Lathe-song. The blue chip curling off the cut,falling hot into the tray, still holding the shape of its leaving.Cutting oil in the hair, the collar, the pillow after.The mill walking its slow bite through stock.Feed rate, gauge, the shriek that means stop,and the shop's one commandment,which is that metal tells the truthand does not raise its voice to do it. They told me you were the smith.They told me, in the same breath, surgeon.Nobody in my father's house explainedthat these were one office.Nobody explained that the blade that opens a manand the blade that opens a bar of steelcome off the same anvil,and that whoever governs the onehas a claim on the other. Old road-clearer. First artisan.The one who went ahead with the cutlassthrough the swallowing darkbecause the others would not go,and came out the far side,and the road existed after that. I was not raised to say your name.I am saying it sideways, in a poem. Because there was a room. Cold ward, rough sheet, fluorescent hour with no noon in it.Machines counting me out loud.A drill going into the hip for the marrow,boring for the seam, bringing up the sample,the body opened at the bone like ore. And then, for days, iron. They put it in at the navel.Understand where that is.The old door. The first mouth.The place a man was fed before he had a name for feeding,sealed for thirty years and opened againwith a needle and a schedule.Iron going in where the cord came out.Whoever arranged that had a sense of humourolder than either of my faiths. And above my head, hung like fruit that has gone over,the bags. Here is the law I was raised on.Pour it out upon the ground as water.Blood leaves. Blood is not received.The ground takes it and the matter is closed. They hung it above me and let it in.Four times. Down a red linethat ran the inside of my right armand turned, at the elbow, for the heart. Somebody else's morning. Somebody else's iron,smelted in a stranger and pumped through mine.I never learned the name. There is no name.There is a bag with a number on itand a man alive because of a number. My mother would not leave the chair.She put her God on the table and her son beside itand would not choose between them,and when the elders had no answershe made the oldest offer there is.Take me. Not him.Which is not a Christian invention.Every altar on that street knew that tradebefore anyone brought a book to Lagos. Then the sweating.Days of it. The sheets wrung out and changed and wrung out.Salt leaving me the way it leaves iron.And the body, three days from being finished,performed its crude and undignified proof,the oldest signal it has,in a room where my mother sat and read,and I turned toward the wall in shame. Let it be written down that this is how I knew.Not the chart. Not the count.The body, without permission, without dignity,without one thought for the solemnity of the occasion,announcing itself in the only languageit has never had to learn. And the fires relit in the bone.Nobody at the switch. No hand on the bellows.The doctors in the doorway with their reasons,holding them, having no use for them. So. If it was you, old smith,you came in through the iron and said nothing.You did not require an altar.You took no palm wine. You asked for no dog.You went ahead through the dark the way you always goand the road was there when I woke. And if it was You, Jehovah, Heavenly Father,whose name I say and whose house I was raised in,then You worked that night through a needle,through a stranger's arm in another city,through a drill, through a machine that counts,through iron in a belly,and You did not tell mewhich of those hands was Yours. I have two names for what happened in that ward.I use one of them out loud. The other I keep the way a man keeps a toolhe does not remember buyingand cannot bring himself to throw away,oiled, wrapped, at the back of the drawer,in case there is work that only it can do. Iron.The mouth closes. — tachi