102 Work poems

The cement plant was like a huge still nailed in gray corrugated panels and left out forty-five years ago in the null center of a meadow to tax itself to remorseless death near a black stream and briars, where from the moment it began to breathe, it began falling apart and burning. But it still went, and the men were paid. The plant made dust. Impalpably fine, hung in a tawny alkaline cloud, swept into drifts against mill room piers, frozen by rain on silo ledges, dust was its first and its final cause. Pinups were traced on their car windshields. Dust gave them jobs, and killed some of them. Late into evening their teeth grated. Its product was dust, its problem dust. The thing was blind to all its own ends but the one. Men’s ordinary lives, measured out on a scale alien to that on which its life was measured, were spent in crawling the junk machine, fitting new gaskets, screws, and bearings, deceiving it towards the mood required for it to avail and pay. Somehow it did. None cheered it. It sustained them.

The housework, the factory work, the work that takes from the body and does not put back. The white-collar work and the dirt of its profits, the terrible politeness of the office worker, the work that robs the viscera to pay the cool surfaces of the brain. All the work that makes love difficult, brings on sleep, drops the body off at the liquor cabinet. All the work that reaches the intestines and sprawls. And the compulsive work after the work is done, those unfillable spaces of the Calvinist, or certain marriage beds.

1 “Always Be Closing,” Liam told us— abc of real estate, used cars, and poetry. Liam the dandy loved Brooks Brothers shirts, double-breasted suits, bespoke shoes, and linen jackets. On the day Liam and Tree married in our backyard, Liam and I wore Chuck’s burgundy boho-prep high-tops that Liam bought on Fifth Avenue. 2 When the rain started, we moved indoors and Liam read a Quartet aloud. T.S. Eliot turned old and frail at sixty, pale, preparing for death. Then poets of new generations died—Frank O’Hara first, then Jim Wright with throat cancer in a Bronx hospice, Sylvia Plath beside the oven, Thom Gunn of an overdose, Denise 3 Levertov, Bob Creeley, Jane Kenyon... In a New York bar, Liam told me eccentric, affectionate stories about a road trip in Tree’s country of Montana, and the joy they felt in the abundance of their marriage. At Bennington Tree said, “Fourteen years after the wedding in your backyard, I love Liam with my entire heart.” 4 Liam’s face changed quickly as he spoke, eyes and mouth erupting with gusto as he improvised his outrageous, cheerful, inventive obscenities. When I first met him—I expounded at a young poet’s do—his bearded face was handsome and expressionless. He would not defer to a poet fifty years old! After a few months 5 he was revising my lines for me, making the metaphors I couldn’t. Even now, working at poems, I imagine for a moment Liam disassembling them. A year ago he watched the progress of age turn me skeletal, pale flesh hanging loosely in folds from my arms, and thin rib-bones like grates above a sagging belly. 6 His body would never resemble my body. Four or five times a week we wrote letters back and forth, talking about class structure, about how Tree took charge over the Academy of American Poets, about poems and new attacks on free speech... When I won a notorious prize, Liam sent me eighty-one notions 7 about projects I might undertake. Number fifty-six instructed me: “Urge poets to commit suicide.” His whole life he spoke of suicide lightly, when he wasn’t preserving the First Amendment from Jesse Helms, or enduring two colon cancers, or watching films, or chatting with Tree, or undergoing heart surgeries. 8 If he walked their dog Keeper one block, he had to take nitroglycerin. When Jane was dying, Liam and Tree drove up to say goodbye. I wheelchaired Jane to a pile of books by her chair to find the color plate of Caillebotte’s shadowy kitchen garden at Yerres for the jacket of Otherwise, when Tree would design it. I think of Jane’s 9 horror if she were alive to know that on August fifteenth Liam pulled the shotgun’s trigger. The night before, wearing a tux over a yellow silk shirt, he danced with Tree once again, before bed and the morning’s murder. He left Tree alone and desolate but without anger. Tree knew Liam did what he planned and needed to do.

Walking back to the office after lunch, I saw Hans. “Mister Isham, Mister Isham,” He called out in his hurry, “Herr Wegner needs you. A woman waiting for a border pass Took poison, she is dead, and the police Are there to take the body.” In the hall, The secretaries stood outside their doors Silently waiting with Wegner. “Sir,” he said, “It was her answer on the questionnaire, A clerk for the Gestapo. So it was.” Within the outer office, by the row Of wooden chairs, one lying on its side, On the discolored brown linoleum floor Under a GI blanket was the lost Unmoving shape; uncovered, from a fold, A dirty foot half out of a dirty shoe, Once white, heel bent, the sole worn through, the skin Bruised red and calloused, uncut toenails curved And veined like an old ivory. No one spoke. Police stood at attention by a stretcher. After an empty moment, suddenly Bent over as if taken by a cramp, I sobbed out loud and, on my uniform, Vomited up my lunch—over the tie, The polished buttons and insignia, The little strips of color and the green Eisenhower jacket with its Eagle patch, The taut pants in a crease, the glistening jump-boots— Vomiting and still sobbing, like a child Awakened in the night, and sick. Wegner and Hans Held me, murmuring, “Ach, dear sir, the war Is over and not over, such things happen.” While no one else moved, Frau Schmidt brought a towel To clean me off before Hans walked me back, My arm across his shoulders and I retelling The story of how, near Zell am See, we found, Hung from a tree in leaf, the final sack Of bones, in rotted Wehrmacht green. In the house An SS lord had furnished for his mistress— Deep sofas, Persian rugs, and velvet drapes— Frau König took my clothes. In my own room, Wearing the Gucci robe Bouchard had taken From a fine house before we got to Ulm, Instead of lying down to rest, I studied The book I read for German with Frau Schmidt, Goethe’s Italian Journey . Through the window, The Watchman’s upper slopes were shadows, green And purple with the afternoon, its snows Melting, its double peaks the victory sign.

Like finding a bar of aluminum wedged in a bull’s jaw. Like discovering in a sea chest a short obsidian head. Like looking through a padlock   and seeing an undeserved dawn. As impossible as all these, as melancholy and lonely, was it to see the green truck that with the punctuality   of a sacrament delivered the coal each month. On the slope its strained   heart would announce itself vociferously, at the brink of death, and it   would stop in front of the house as if to deliver the agonizing news of   the fall of Troy. And then a man, wrapped in sacking, would pitch   his cargo, resonant and angular, into an orange-painted crate. Like opening a Bible and finding three leaves of laurel. Like lifting   a stone and remembering someone’s name. Like finding the same   snail again a hundred miles away. As impossible as all these, as melancholy and lonely, would it be to find, fifteen years later, the same coal    deliveryman carrying on his trade, bent from the strain, determined   to show the heavens that a man might do that job his entire life, that   he scraped in the mines, that he stole thread from his wife to sew his   sacking, that he dreamed of infinite excavations, of tunnels, and that   they might forgive him for not having done more than that.

I first discovered what was killing these men. I had three sons who worked with their father in the tunnel: Cecil, aged 23, Owen, aged 21, Shirley, aged 17. They used to work in a coal mine, not steady work for the mines were not going much of the time. A power Co. foreman learned that we made home brew, he formed a habit of dropping in evenings to drink, persuading the boys and my husband — give up their jobs and take this other work. It would pay them better. Shirley was my youngest son; the boy. He went into the tunnel. My heart     my mother     my heart     my mother My heart     my coming into being.

Is the governor falling From a great height? Arm in arm we fled the brassiere factory, The motion-boat stayed on the shore! I saw how round its bottom was As you walked into southern France— Upon the light hair of an arm Cigar bands lay! I kissed you then. Oh is my bar The insect of your will? The water rose, But will the buffalo on The nickel yet be still? For how can windows hold out the light In your eyes! Darling, we fled the brassiere factory In forty-eight states, Arm in arm, When human beings hung on us And you had been arrested by the cloths Were used in making, and I said, “The Goths Know such delight,” but still we fled, away Into a dinner atmosphere From all we knew, and fall asleep this day. O maintenance men, with cruel eyes, Then arm in arm we fled the listless factory! The music changed your fingers’ ends to pearl, I punched you, you foolish girl, For thanks to the metronome we got out alive, in the air Where the sun filled us with cruelty! There’s what to do Except despair, like pages! and laugh Like prawns, about the sea! Oh arm in arm we fled the industry Into an earth of banks And foolish tanks, for what bare breasts might be.

Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves are strung along a stick, the women standing in the August heat for hours—since first light— under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt. The older children hand the leaves from the slide, three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides waiting in what little shade there is: it’s ten o’clock, almost dinnertime. They pull the pails of cold lunch and Mason jars of tea out of the spring when they see the farmer coming from the field, their men stripped to the waist, polished by sweat and tired as mules. By afternoon, the loose cotton dresses, even the headrags are dark with sweat. Still their fingers never miss a stitch, though they’re paid not by the stick but by the day, and the talk—unbroken news of cousins and acquaintances— unwinding with the ball of twine, a frayed snuff-twig bouncing on one lip, the string paying out through their calluses, the piles of wide green leaves diminishing, until the men appear with the last slide and clamber up the rafters of the barn to line the loaded sticks along the tiers. It’s Friday: the farmer pays with a wad of ones and fives, having turned the mule out to its feed and water, hung up the stiffened traces and the bit. He checks again the other barns, already fired, crude ovens of log and mud where the crop is cured; in that hot dry acrid air, spreads a yellowing leaf across his palm, rolls an edge in his fingers, gauging by its texture and its smell how high to drive the fire. His crew is quiet in the pickup truck—did you think they were singing? They are much too tired to even speak, can barely lick salt from the back of a hand, brush at flies, hush a baby with a sugartit. And the man who owns this land is also tired. Everyday this week he’s meant to bring home pears from the old tree by the barn, but now he sees the fruit has fallen, sees the yellow jackets feeding there. He lights a Lucky, frames a joke for his wife—he’ll say their banker raised a piss-poor field this year. And she will lean against the doorjamb while he talks, while he scrubs his hands at the tin basin with a split lemon and a pumice stone, rubs them raw trying to cut the gummy resin, that stubborn black stain within the green.

This is a day when I covered no ground. Just pushed and shuffled my papers around, Nudged at letters and winced at bills, Sorting them out into different hills, Hunted fretfully for a ruler, Worried the overworked water cooler, Sharpened pencils and filled my pen, Then shuffled my papers around again.

The Butcher’s Apprentice, 1911–1914 by August Sander The high white collar and the bowler hat, The black coat of respectability, The starched cuff and the brandished cigarette Are what he has decided we will see, Though in the closet hangs an apron flecked With bits of  brain beside the rubber boots Stained brown from wading through the bloody slick That by the end of every workday coats The killing floor he stands on. He declines To illustrate as in a children’s book The work he does, although it will define Him every time the photograph he took Is shown and captioned for posterity — Even as his proud eyes and carriage say That what he is is not what he would be, In a just world where no one had to slay.