Antimetrical Lyric of the San Joachin

One syncopation in the clean rhythm of another
 enjambed morning, November, 6 A.M.:
A switch-engine slows by the depot, and two men

 swing off. They walk the strophic walk
Of fathers in their early forties who still have pity
 on the work of the brake shoe and the piston.

The only exegesis they want now
 is oatmeal at this diner built in the shadow
Of a smokestack capped by methane flame.

 I watch the woman at the grill sling hash browns.
She cannot forget the nakedness of junkyards
 along the highway west of Modesto,

The paternal violence of the wrecking ball.
 She believes in angels she saw once
In the back yard of a tract house in Bakersfield

 next to a blocked-up Impala with hellfire
Detailed on its fenders. Her memory splinters
 the otherworldly prosody of their moaning.

But crossing-arms ascend, and the switchmen
 open the door. Over eggs, I consider how language
Refuses the faultlines that grind between

 the dactyl and the trochee, the cries of cherubim
Screwing in a shadow cast by General Motors. And what
 Does her Father in Heaven whisper through the hot grid

Of the window screen, hand lost in the caesura
 of his greasy fly? Say nothing. Tell no one. You want
Sausage or closure? The check. All right. Scan this:

 Breakfast is not iambic. Neither is mercy.