Three Point Linkage

We forge deeper
links as we share in pain.
Mischance brings us together
best. Like unasked wildfire,
we respond to our human limits
by a call for help
and find ourselves,
with brothers,
sisters thankful
for our existence...

Don’t say there is no help
to be had in going alone?
For don’t we like to pin
ourselves on, to do it all
proud and by ourselves,
where -as long as we have the tractor
-that enabling machine
with its three point linkage
we are convinced that we
are triangulated,
solid as a Trinity.

Melvyn, my older brother,
was deft with tools,
with machines and things.
Implements were extensions
of his own arms and legs.
He grew up on the tractor, so
his limbs shaped and stretched
first to reach clutch and hoist
and then both of the independent brakes,
and he it made him seem wrought
as steel, tough, impregnable.

The tough was okay until
the day he tried to use both
his arms for lifting a pine stump as well
as to move the hoist arm.
The weight rolled forward
so he had gotten in,
standing between the scoop,
inside the tractor’s three point linkage,
which, coming up, tipped the stump
so he needed both his own arms
to stop it falling over on him.

That hoist, in the cage
of its stay-barred linkage arms,
fused my brother's legs into the vices
of the housing, and drafted proud him in
its hydraulic hug, even then
he bore his independence as silence
till it burst out blue murder.

Then, gripped three ways
he implemented a thing beneath
his pride, a animated out full
of wretched humble human feeling
to a violent plea: a fork of Yeouw!
breaking into the sturm and drang..,
that brought lightning
so it only split
part of a second for me
to move my butt,
to reach the lever,
to give an arm,
to lend the hand he didn’t have,
to throw the hoist lever
that released him, back
to his choice about humanity.

But it was the steel
of the three point linkage
that left him with
proud bruises as a boast.


20 November 1996 © Wayne David Knoll
St Joseph’s House of Prayer, Goulburn, NSW