You knew it was coming:
Twenty-three years and the mine
Would notice you one time,
Photocopied.
A voice below bellows
Your name, Dave,
Into the settling air of coal dust.
After you shut off the engines
And descend beneath the dragline's skeletal
Nose which canopies like a skyscraper on
Its side in mid-air
You confront a face
You cannot see in the descending sun. Shadow-still,
Enormous might engulfing over you
To the height of
The dragline's triple-tank wheels,
You see him--
The heels on his leather boots
Locked in the train-track grooves of dirt.
As he hands the notice to you
Its stiffness shakes
In your calloused hand.
You know that what is left of the day
Is becoming cold; and despite the smell
Of dirt there is a scent
Of watermelon in the damp air,
Although you do not know it as that smell
Or that there is a smell at all, really.
And yet a faintness of some half-knowledge
That touches its weight lightly in your mind
Drags itself into places you cannot touch.
Pulling out of his shadow
You think of how you might hand
This sheet to your wife
Like a child presenting to his mother
An award from school:
Your wife screaming laughter of relief
As she hugs the paper to her breast;
Or how your strong hand might sweat
As you pick up the receiver of the ringing phone,
Expecting that after saying "Hi"
That one of your college children's voices would end
The conversation there
For you to hand the vibrations
To your wife--but instead
That child
Congratulates you
For no longer destroying the land.
The noon hour whistle
Vibrates the walls
Of the hollow heavens
To the cab; the thermos-well
Of soup, sitting on your lap, you cannot see, but
You feel its stillness
Stagnating and absorbing
The contaminating minerals
Of the tin, walling in the contents;
And still you want to turn on the ignition
To finish out one more complete day
In the twenty-three years here
Of hard work.
The quandary then snaps, and you escape.
When out of the valley you enter the truck
And close the door--
The second time harder, and it latches.
You turn the key
And the truck bounces to the highway.
You stop at the sign;
Stop the motor while
Still on the dirt road;
But in the end turn left, again,
Home.
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Maddog
(Or Death to the Barbie-Dame Image)
You said that it happened--that day you ran away
From a self you buried underneath the ice-packed snow,
All those cold years ago--when your last friend, then
Had put an end to the Gabriele whom I've never known.
This
Friend, like yourself a Barbie Dame, became totally
lame and
Withdrew out the door when you needed more hands to
keep
Your epileptic roommate
From smashing her head on the floor.
Gabriele, held together by the stitching of hate--
The plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff arms
That the factory of the human race mutantly created--
This time it will be you who shall feel the wall of
artificial
Fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing falling
out.
For a little maddog on top of four joints
Makes a person see the unsealed human fragments
That had been smoothed over in time
Like a million and some bone fractures
The milk of approval had swum into and covered over
for looks.
For me fragmenting came yesterday when I saw a welcome
mat
Iced over and yet I entered:
Your house was hot and your oven smelled of baking
meatloaf
Although you had said that you could not be
domesticated.
And then I saw your bottle of wine
Standing at attention before two glasses.
The pledge that bowing to anything or anyone was
wrong...that people
Were only needed to gain the most bare
Of physiological and psychological needs (pitstops to
being
human)--this was
gone.
Gone with your hair brushed and your skin smelling of
perfume
For some other man than me.
Come on Gabriele, the gal that used to chew tobacco
and
Spit it into an empty beer can...
The gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes...
The maddog gal, grip that wine glass now.
For Gabriele, you smile at everyone with meaning
You are as together as a feather when a hurricane is
in town,
And when the hangover's over and your own insight has
Fragmented you from a million pieces to a billion,
My stiff polar bear arms
Shall poke and not embrace.
I sit back at this party I am hosting--
My back firmly pushing against the back of my chair,
And my head and eyes cocked.
You all are the performers this time...
And Gabriele, you are the main attraction,
Attracted, after this night, to the omni-present sense
of your
Smashed self; and me--
Sensitive little me in no man's land
Where no man wanted to grasp me from...
And no woman--
Mended back together in thy survivalistic polar bear
image.
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