102 Work poems

One hand slops suds on, one hustles them down like a blind. Brusque noon glare, filtered thus, loosens and glows. For five or six minutes he owns the place, dismal coffee bar, and us, its huddled underemployed. A blade, black line against the topmost glass, begins, slices off the outer lather, flings it away, works inward, corrals the frothy middle, and carves, with quick cuts, the stuff down, not looking for anything, beneath or inside. Homes to the last, cleans its edges, grooms it for the end, then shaves it off and flings it away. Which is splendid, and merciless. And all in the wrist. Then, he looks at us. We makers of filth, we splashers and spitters. We sitters and watchers. Who like to see him work. Who love it when he leaves and gives it back: our grim hideout, half spoiled by clarity.

We wonder at our shifting capacities, keep adding and striking skills from the bottoms of our r é sum é s under constant revision like the inscriptions on tombs shared for generations unnervingly up to date Made nervous by our shift in capabilities, we write: I visited a country where kittens lay  dying under every bench, in every gutter, next to every  cigarette butt. One  made  me  weep. Two   made   me  worry.  Three   made   me look  away.  I  visited  a  city  with  very  few strays.  The   first   one   I   saw   I   adopted. What  could  it  mean? —posted by Sarah. 6.18.06 Hit “publish” and look away The New Violence: I visited a country where everything looked like home

After his ham & cheese in the drape factory cafeteria, having slipped by the bald shipping foreman to ride a rattling elevator to the attic where doves flicker into the massive eaves and where piled boxes of out-of-style cotton and lace won’t ever be decorating anyone’s sun parlor windows. Having dozed off in that hideout he fixed between five four-by-six cardboard storage cartons while the rest of us pack Mediterranean Dreams and Colonial Ruffles and drapes colored like moons, and he wakes lost— shot through into a world of unlocked unlocking light— suddenly he knows where he is and feels half nuts and feels like killing some pigeons with a slingshot. That’s all, and that’s why he pokes his calloused fingers into the broken machinery, hunting for loose nuts a half inch wide— five greasy cold ones that warm in his pocket— and yanks back the snag-cut strip of inner tube with a nut snug at the curve to snap it at the soft chest of a dopey bird. Then the noise of pigeons flopping down to creosoted hardwood, and then a grin the guy gives me & all his other pals later. And afternoon tightens down on all our shoulders, until the shift whistle blasts, blowing through the plant like air through lace. As it always has, as it does. That bright. That stunned.

A sleeper , they used to call it— four passes with the giant round saw and you had a crosstie, 7 inches by 9 of white oak— at two hundred pounds nearly twice my weight and ready to break finger or toe— like coffin lids, those leftover slabs, their new-sawn faces turning gold and brown as my own in the hot Virginia sun, drying toward the winter and the woodsaw and on the day of that chore I turned over a good, thick one looking for the balance point and roused a three-foot copperhead, gold and brown like the wood, disdaining the shoe it muscled across, each rib distinct as a needle stitching leather, heavy on my foot as a crosstie.

The names of things—sparks! I ran on them like a component: Henries, microhenries, Blue Beavers, wee wee ductors: Biographer of small lives, Of a plug and his girl named Jack, Of Utopian colonies which worked— Steel, germanium, brass, aluminum, Replaceables. Outside, afloat, my words Swung an arm charting the woman Who was the river bottom. We tried, beyond work, at work, To keep what we loved. Near Christmas I remember the office Women trimming their desperately Glittering holy day trees. And, Just as I left, the company Talent show, the oils and sentiment Thick on still lifes and seacoasts, The brush strokes tortured as a child’s First script. Someone Had studied driftwood; another man, The spray of a wave, the mania Of waters above torpedoes.

He can only drink tea now, screwed and filed. She is dead, in metal flecks. 55 years old and look like a bad nail by God they yanked me out I can tell you

All evening I hunted the bird that wanted a cage of glass, here where cemetery slides into creek, fronting what was once the largest indoor leather mill in the world. There the skins gathered for cleansing, coloring, scraping, shipping off. It closed three years after a lone sparrow set up camp behind the only desk in the only full-serve service station left in town where, from four to seven nightly one summer, I blackened the pages of books with my thumbs. Whatever it sought there— thumping its frightened body against glass, into cabinets or out to the bays scrubbed raw with gasoline where the broken waited to be raised up, hosed off, fastened together in hope of coughing to life again— whatever it sought was not a dollar slipped through a window cracked because patronage was right for the aging ladies of August to provide from Chryslers cool in the sun. There was nothing to be found in books or boxes of parts. And the tools hanging from pegs were as useless as my hands, which could not patch together those straggling conveyances any more than I could with a tattered broom batter the bird to freedom as I swung at fluttering terror as I sought with useless devices some fortune reposed in corners of grease and dust.

Coming home with the last load I ride standing on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor in hot exhaust, lank with sweat, my arms strung awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform. Almost 500 bales we’ve put up this afternoon, Marshall and I. And of course I think of another who hung like this on another cross. My hands are torn by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended on two points of pain in the rising monoxide, recall that greater suffering. Well, I change grip and the image fades. It’s been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop, but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed. Now is our last chance to bring in the winter’s feed, and Marshall needs help. We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales to the barn, these late, half-green, improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds or more, yet must be lugged by the twine across the field, tossed on the load, and then at the barn unloaded on the conveyor and distributed in the loft. I help— I, the desk-servant, word-worker— and hold up my end pretty well too; but God, the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe. I think of those who have done slave labor, less able and less well prepared than I. Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony, her father in the camps of Moldavia and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands too bloodied cannot bear even the touch of air, even the touch of love. I have a friend whose grandmother cut cane with a machete and cut and cut, until one day she snicked her hand off and took it and threw it grandly at the sky. Now in September our New England mountains under a clear sky for which we’re thankful at last begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches in their first color. I look beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills, to the notch where the sunset is beginning, then in the other direction, eastward, where a full new-risen moon like a pale medallion hangs in a lavender cloud beyond the barn. My eyes sting with sweat and loveliness. And who is the Christ now, who if not I? It must be so. My strength is legion. And I stand up high on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say woe to you, watch out you sons of bitches who would drive men and women to the fields where they can only die.

At Waffle House, they fired her on the spot: “You talk too much!” She’d told her customers That “made” gets “mad” and “poet” goes to “pot” Without the letter e. The “amateurs,” She’d said, “inherit everything: the sand, The stars, the world that only God possesses.” While washing dishes with a bleeding hand, She’d told them, “through ‘possession’s’ double ‘esses’ There’s a line that cleaves; things come apart; ‘Refrain’ means both ‘hold back’ and ‘go again’; Things join in wholes of which they are a part.” She “touched” the people. Was it such a sin? Her broken pencil left a double line On my tab, both legible as one design.

My desk is cleared of the litter of ages; Before me glitter the fair white pages; My fountain pen is clean and filled, And the noise of the office has long been stilled. Roget’s Thesaurus is at my hand, And I’m ready to do some work that’s grand, Dignified, eminent, great, momentous, Memorable, worthy of note, portentous, Beautiful, paramount, vital, prime, Stirring, eventful, august, sublime. For this is the way, I have read and heard, That authors look for the fitting word. All of the proud ingredients mine To build, like Marlowe, the mighty line. But never a line from my new-filled pen That couldn’t be done by a child of ten. Oh, how did Shelley and how did Keats Weave magic words on the fair white sheets Under conditions that, were they mine, I couldn’t bear? And I’d just resign. Yet Milton wrote passable literature Under conditions I couldn’t endure. Coleridge and Chatterton did their stuff Over a road that I’d christen rough. Wordsworth and—soft!—could it be that they Waited until they had something to say?