ODE TO TENNESSEE

Once upon a time everything
was homemade. The tortillas
down to the choclate eclairs
the little girls and little boys
would pick their share of as they
dangled from the arms
of chain-smoking, novena-plastered
mothers in pill box hats. The bread
smelted forth out a great silent
machine, those round
gray towers – a day's worth of bread
handed over the counters
of grocers and day-old places
full of handwritten credits.
The sales-girl faces the same
over and over from the liquor shops
to the mercantile where the women
felt the worth of yards of gingham
with garden-tended hands stuck
in apron pockets over poodle frocks.
And as they fondled bolts of laundry
hung out to dry on sagging lines
nearwhere the stockyard blood
soaked into the sawdust from coin-op horses,
they hummed the benediction

another day older and deeper in debt.
Eight hours in the mineral graves
for ten loaves or six yards of eyelet,
before the burns and infestations,
the migrations of paisley, the formation
of smokes over the Dead Sea downwind
from Cananea, pleurosis-nervosis in most of us.
The commemorations were handmade and so trusted,
the dusting powders and ore cars full of snuff,
Yardley Rose of Avon, poor damn Lucky Strike.
The seas too tired to part.


The Douglas smelter was the single most polluting industrial plant in North America, and Phelps Dodge "did everything to maintain production" despite its clear violation of the 1970 Clean Air Act (p. 137).

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3686/is_200204/ai_n9035572