Vulcan

The householder issuing to the street Is adrift a moment in that ice stiff Exterior. ‘Peninsula Low lying in the bay And wooded—’ Native now Are the welder and the welder’s arc In the subway’s iron circuits: We have not escaped each other, Not in the forest, not here. The crippled girl hobbles Painfully in the new depths Of the subway, and painfully We shift our eyes. The bare rails And black walls contain Labor before her birth, her twisted Precarious birth and the men Laborious, burly—She sits Quiet, her eyes still. Slowly, Deliberately she sees An anchor’s blunt fluke sink Thru coins and coin machines, The ancient iron and the voltage In the iron beneath us in the child’s deep Harbors into harbor sand.