Sirens at the Mill

 

The drone of online dulled a metal-sweet sleep

that made it painless to mop up melted time

and ring it into dumpster number one.

 

For me, the machine was easy.

It asked for nothing but reaction

and acquiescence to rhythm.

Sky-high wages to steel-toed idle?

No problem.  So I worked with it.

 

And after a while

it was breath, it was beat,

brand new involuntary.

And as I locked on into patterns,

all I could do was listen:

to blue-blade harmonies, steel-braced downbeat,

repetita, repetita, repetita, repetita

in knife time.

It was nice.

 

I numbed and understood

how anyone could wear the grind,

lifer with a shard smile,

because the whole thing was habit and ritual.

And there’s no place safer.

 

And then right in the middle of constant,

right next to rely, on top of depend,

there’s this catch

on a ring that I wasn’t supposed to be wearing.

 

There was time, I thought, for a laugh or two.

There was room I thought for a healthy

“Well fool, look what you did now,”

I mean there’s always slack in my schedule.

 

Until I felt it:

The rip of penitence, pinch of metal press, crush of forward,

and old clichés stepped lively,

cold as a machine, thorough as a machine.

And I thought of my brother down at the Popsicle factory,

put his hand on a guardrail as a two-ton punch press

whistled millimeters from his fingers.

And I thought of my grandfather down at the Coca-Cola bottler,

he lost half of both his thumbs.

And you wonder where these scars come from,

from here, from now

here and now,

here and now

because it’s not stopping, it won’t stop.

And I can feel it pull absence of ice and itch of flame

and the smooth dry cross-grain of a man’s back

and I know,

I know,

I know,

I know,

I know . . .

Until some slo-mo supervisor swam through nappy-time

and pushed a button;

gave me back a sense of gift;

tangible grace now,

one under which we flourish,

and one that I will not now

do without.