102 Work poems

In a precisely lighted room, the CFO speaks of  start-to-start dependencies. Says let me loop back with you. Says please cascade as appropriate. It’s that time of morning, so we all can smell the doughnut factory. If scent were white noise, doughnuts would be that scent. The factory won’t sell at any price. The building next to it burns the animals we experiment on. I have worked on a few preclinical reports in my time. The rhesus monkeys become so desperate that they attempt suicide, over and over again. I am legally obligated to spare you the particulars. How could things be any different? Here many choice molecules have been born. Here. This pill will dissolve like sugar. Your last five months will be good ones.

Fair season and we’re tent pitching on holy grounds in central Illinois, busting through pavement with jack hammers, driving home a stake that will be pulled two months from now. One of us holds, the other presses down, grease shooting between cracks in the old hammer’s worn shell to our hands and faces—one slip and we’ve lost our toes. I’m from the warehouse, not the tent crew. I haven’t ridden around in tent haulers across the nation popping tents here and there, but for this, the state fair, the warehousers are let out to feel important. Around us a silvered city has risen, white vinyl tents at full mast and clean for the first time in a year. It’s August. It’s the summer’s dogged days when humidity doesn’t break until midnight, an hour after the fair’s closed down. We’re piled on back of a flatbed with our tools, our tiredness. We’re a monster understood best by Midwesterners, devouring parking lots and fields, our teeth stained by cigarette and chew, some of us not old enough, some too old. All of us here for the overtime.

I watched him swinging the pick in the sun, breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock, and the rocks into dust, and the dust into earth again. I must have sat for a very long time on the split rail fence, just watching him. My father’s body glistened with sweat, his arms flew like dark wings over his head. He was turning the backyard into terraces, breaking the hill into two flat plains. I took for granted the power of him, though it frightened me, too. I watched as he swung the pick into the air and brought it down hard and changed the shape of the world, and changed the shape of the world again.

The sour smell, blue stain, water squirts out round the wedge, Lifting quarters of rounds covered with ants, "a living glove of ants upon my hand" the poll of the sledge a bit peened over so the wedge springs off and tumbles ringing like high-pitched bells into the complex duff of twigs poison oak, bark, sawdust, shards of logs, And the sweat drips down. Smell of crushed ants. The lean and heave on the peavey that breaks free the last of a bucked three-foot round, it lies flat on smashed oaklings— Wedge and sledge, peavey and maul, little axe, canteen, piggyback can of saw-mix gas and oil for the chain, knapsack of files and goggles and rags, All to gather the dead and the down. the young men throw splits on the piles bodies hardening, learning the pace and the smell of tools from this delve in the winter death-topple of elderly oak. Four cords.

My brother wore bags over his boots to keep the grease & grime from his time at the steel mill off the carpet & steps he mounted, heaving each foot like a monster born of the grave -yard shift — stiff & awkward, his arms smeared w/dark matter, the lather of machine & industry bathing his clothes & face in a glaze of sweat & smoke, oil & the dirt of what’s been done before — the work of uncles & cousins who wore the same jumpsuit, goggles & gloves to grab hold of cold finished bars using their backs & shoulders to move the weight around w/the help of machines, the knobs to control the two-ton bundles held by a buckle above the heads of hard-hatted men that could snap & let loose the mass of all that metal meant to weld into a foundation, a beginning to build upon when it was his time to work, to clock in clean & leave feeling filthy no matter the shift or stiffness in the bones creaking like the wooden stairs he climbed

Myths of the landscape— the sun going down in the mouths of the furnaces, the fires banked and cooling, ticking into dark, here and there the sudden flaring into roses, then the light across the long factory of the field, the split and rusted castings, across the low slant tin roofs of the buildings, across fallow and tar and burnt potato ground. . . . Everything a little still on fire, in sunlight, then smoke, then cinder, then the milling back to earth, rich earth, the silica of ash. The times I can taste the iron in the air, the gray wash like exhaust, smell the burn-off, my eyes begin to tear, and I'm leaning against a wall, short of breath, my heart as large as my father's, alone in such poverty my body scars the light. Arable fields, waste and stony places, waysides— the day he got the job at the Wellbaum and Company Foundry he wept, and later, in the truck, pulled the plug on a bottle. In the metallurgy of ore and coal and limestone, in the conversion of the green world to gray, in the face of the blue-white fires, I remember the fencerow, the white campion, calyx and coronal scales, the hawthorns, cut to the size of hedge, the haws so deep in the blood of the season they bled. The year we were poor enough to dig potatoes we had to drive there, then wait for the men to leave who let fires go out. There'd be one good hour of daylight, the rough straight rows running into shade. We'd work the ground until the sun was a single line. I can see my father, now cut in half by the horizon, coming toward me, both arms weighted down. I can see him bending over, gone. Later, in the summer, I'd have painted the dead rust undulant sides of all the buildings aluminum, which in the morning threw a glare like water on the garden.

Each day the job gets up And rubs its eyes We are going to live on in dry amazement Workers push the granite bed under the avenue Bed of the married The re-          the pre-married Making a form as forms become infinite The scrapings       scraping Graywhacke    chert People wait for their bumpy little pizzas Theories of theories in gravity voices Melpomene goddess of tragedy bathes Mostly the bride never the bridesmaid Angel food in whole foods Consider Tanguy whose lunar responses to childhood Made everything a horizon Those walking upside down don’t know what to think The finch engineering itself to deep spring Or you        life       tired of being cured How many layers Of giving up are there One of it Two of everything in the arc you save

The factory stands on the train of your town’s wedding gown, dirtying it and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Embarrassed, the clouds rush to cover up the track marks of the stars. On your way home from the factory -run theater, it’s too dark to say hello to the pale-faced people plummeting past you and your son. Who knows what bright things they conceal in their black coats now that they’ve rationed the rations. Home before curfew, the iodine tablets fume in the bedtime glass of water your son requests. He sips it as if it were hot tea while you read to him yet again that ancient story you three loved. You stumble over the new language, but even it is becoming beautiful. You close the book, kiss his forehead, stand the flashlight upright by the fuming glass and stumble to your bed in the dark. Your son will wake in the night and turn on the flashlight so he can see the water that he will turn into urine that you will carry in an armful of sheets down to the river, that gray, dappled, broken thing running through the dying trees like an app -aloosa spooked by gunfire.

Each day I go into the fields to see what is growing and what remains to be done. It is always the same thing: nothing is growing, everything needs to be done. Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray till my bones ache and hands rub blood-raw with honest labor— all that grows is the slow intransigent intensity of need. I have sown my seed on soil guaranteed by poverty to fail. But I don’t complain—except to passersby who ask me why I work such barren earth. They would not understand me if I stooped to lift a rock and hold it like a child, or laughed, or told them it is their poverty I labor to relieve. For them, I complain. A farmer of dreams knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams knows what it means to be patient. Each day I go into the fields.

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl— Life's little duties do—precisely As the very least Were infinite—to me— —Emily Dickinson, #443 My mother’s mother, widowed very young of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit, moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue and country heart anaesthetized and mute with labor. So her kind was taught to do— “Find work,” she would reply to every grief— and her one dictum, whether false or true, tolled heavy with her passionate belief. Widowed again, with children, in her prime, she spoke so little it was hard to bear so much composure, such a truce with time spent in the lifelong practice of despair. But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone, her dishes, and how painfully they shone.