Ode To Rocks
In pockets and gardens, under
our beds for miners carry
a fair share in long gray
pails with jugs of soup
near shanks and flesh
with crusts plus those
stored in the chests.
The spare parts of the world
cast about pose a craving
as deep as the ocean is long
as the rivers are wide. A record
of perennial harvests hauled
up from the ground
on ladders of iron, even that!
Beloved fountains of slag
pour into banks of remains
where genuflection pays
paper for gold and time with loss.
Poor men fair well in shifts,
forever on the way in or out
with dirt clinging, dirt in love
with the heroic skin, part
ancient shroud part, let me in.
They are out. I doubt that there is one miner or miner's family who is not completely touched by this momentous occassion. My own father who worked underground for Phelps Dodge refused to be buried when he died for exactly this reason...the fear of being caught in a mine collapse. It's really something to see the world pay attention to the miners and their families...men who work underground and go relatively unnoticed by society day to day....have never been unnoticed by those who love them. Every time there is a mine collapse, I post this poem (In the Mines in Mexico, They Weep) which started many, many years ago and looked quite different then. It's still not finished and today I am adding the line toward the middle, "The small white butterflies." because the miner's themselves (not all) attribute their safety to having stopped to watch a small white butterfly from outside the mine....2000 some feet down into the ground that is. Much of my early work concentrates most definitely on being raised in a mining town and in a mining family including all of the Odes like the one above, Ode to Rocks. And this year we are noticing Freport McMoran returning our old town to its mining focus....roads being built, big machines and men in hard hats wondering around doing this and that...strange lights up on the slag heaps at all hours.
In The Mines Of Mexico They Weep
Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and chaos . . . . the elder encourages the younger and shows him how . . . they two shall launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars and sweeps through the ceaseless rings and shall never be quiet again. - Walt Whitman, in the preface to Leaves of Grass.
In a twilight pilgrimmage
via these frost cracked streets
close to the Campbell shaft
full of our fathers breath and breathing,
we unfold our own cloth on the Fourth of July,
one crease at a time on the crags
near the ballpark in Warren, down from
the Loma Linda and the old mine-boss housing.
Flashlights dangle from the hands
of children. The night catches us deeply
unaware, but they don't think like that,
they are that,
think more about the starting time,
and the firemen on top of the dumps
who signal the end by waving lanterns,
how they crave that sort of thing
up there on those mountains of slag
thinking, as ours do, of the breath
of canaries and candles deep in those old holes.
The small white butterflies.
A persistent and unheard whimper
fills space on this weary-
happy picnic in July or maybe
it only fills the weariness with something else.
I clasp a child tight in my arms,
a finger closes the tender wound,
hush hush, our waiting begins, we settle down.
Our Fourth of July is in sweet tortuous ruins
thrown in a trash bin of appetites lost.
We've run from one excitement to another
races, parades, contests, reunions
thankful for a gentle sun, there was no burning
and there will be few scars if any.
The miles between this and that
contract like stars in heaven where
light reaches us much too late
and we as well, get there accordingly.
This is the anniversary of all
that's happened here
for each body on this ragged old quilt,
each poor soul and dumbstruck
face tipped up toward the sky.
The silence between one person and the next
is only the truth where commentary has failed.
I look around me one last time
before the sun takes all the light away -
count the faces I own, erase what's left,
a small town thing to do on an occasion like this.
The darkness is complete and the fireworks begin.
My daughter tells me, during one of the beautiful
interims which goes like this:
ooh, aah, wonderful! then another interim and another,
one day the sun will die
as copper sulphur spark comets flower dark,
my father scatters in the sky,
Oh! Mufasa, talk to me!
First draft sometime 03/06 however the sketch for this poem much earlier...probably in the mid 90's.
