The mantra builds by accretion, each line repeating the last and adding one demand. Get the job. Get it done. Get it done right. On time. Once. And make a profit. Six lines, and by the end the sentence has become almost unspeakable — which is the point, because that is what running a business feels like from inside. Every clause is reasonable. The accumulation is not.

The typography carries meaning here. Full capitals throughout, and the final demand pushed hard to the right margin, physically separated from the rest. Profit arrives late, arrives indented, and arrives after every quality standard has already been met. A man who wanted money first would have written a different ladder.

What distinguishes this from the 1986 original is everything after the mantra. “Craftsmanship, Pride, Clean Hands, Grace.” Four nouns, capitalised like virtues in a guild charter, and the third one is the surprise. Craftsmanship and pride are expected in this company. Grace is a theological word doing secular work. Clean hands sits between them and means both things at once — a tradesman washing up at the end of a shift, and the older sense of having done nothing that requires concealment.

“On To The Next Job— / And Life’s Legacy To Follow” makes the poem’s largest claim in the fewest words. The legacy is not a monument or a fortune. It is the sequence of jobs, one after another, and what accumulated while the man was busy doing them.

The closing couplet is the only passage in lowercase and the only one in italic, and the shift in register is total. “When you smell sawdust and sweat— / pause, hands clasped, say a prayer of gratitude.” An instruction rather than a statement, addressed to someone else. The trigger is smell, which is the sense that reaches memory most directly and least deliberately. And “hands clasped” completes an arc the poem has been building without announcing it: hands that get the job done, hands kept clean, hands finally folded.

Set against “Life’s Little Peccadilloes,” where the mantra first appeared, the difference is instructive. There it was presented as a young man’s ambition, immediately followed by a client’s lesson in humility — the mantra was the setup for a correction. Here it stands without correction, and what follows it is not humility but gratitude. Forty years is the distance between those two responses.

The mantra is a genuinely good piece of construction and always was — a cumulative ladder where each rung is reasonable and the total is punishing. Forty years on it still reads as something a working person would pin above a desk, which is the highest compliment available to it.

The revision earns the second look. “Clean Hands” is the phrase that repays attention, holding a literal end-of-shift washing and a much older idea about integrity in two words. And the closing couplet does something the 1986 version could not: it converts a productivity creed into a devotional one without disowning any of it. Nothing is retracted. Gratitude is simply added at the end, triggered by a smell.

Two reservations. The middle section is the weakest link — “On To The Next Job— / And Life’s Legacy To Follow” states the poem’s thesis outright, and the capitalisation gives it a plaque-like formality that the sawdust ending achieves far more delicately. Trusting the reader would have been stronger.

And the piece is doing something unusual for this catalog: it is largely a found object with a new coda. Judged as a poem written in 2026 it is slight. Judged as forty years of revision visible in a single page, it is considerably more interesting than its line count suggests.