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Coal
I watch them step into the sun
when first light strikes the dark faces
and they pause, blink, bib overalls coated with labor,
metal lunch pails shingled with stickers and myth.
I want to look at the eyes, shining like dollars of streaked gold,
the eyes of the father and the father’s father,
exhausted eyes of twelve year-old boys stationed between mules.
I need to strip romance down to an ebony cough,
a limestone room falling in slow motion,
a never-ending high sulfur flow like a rush of black blood.
At 2 AM under fluorescence I’m reading John Keats
as my computer blinks an iambic refrain
and I’m thinking of the honeycombed earth
where the beauty of a ninety degree crosscut
and the truth of an articulating crawler are all that really matter.
I’m listening in vain for a voice rising above the rumble,
that constant pirouetting of worn rollers,
the occasional clank of a metal splice gone bad,
a dusty metaphor in a language I almost remember.
But when I plumb the deep-set eyes
and stand three hundred feet below
in a heavy darkness I can taste like marsh ferns and carbide,
tethered to strands of crusted cobalt,
waiting for the spiked wheelworks to splice through,
I see those blue flames of need-fire burst from pitch;
stone-deaf, I hear that voice, forging words hard as coal.