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The Tipple (Ars Poetica)
It’s nine degrees and too quiet.
Smoke from a power plant six miles off
hangs like a purple wound,
jagged chase in the soft skin of sky
and it seems the cold has smothered too,
any audible sounds of labor.
Far down the tracks a Mo-Pac engine
throbs in dieseled cadence.
Above on the load-out platform
workers bunch along yellow-painted railing.
I climb the steel treads,
kick through piles of powdery coal dust,
across checkerplated flooring
where rusted boxcars pass below,
hoppers poised to belch dark cataracts,
the shards glistening, gathering as
the burden of mind, culled and channeled
to the headchute’s Blackwall hitch.
Steam rises from metal thermoses.
Men talk among themselves,
their breath like spirit deserting flesh.
I join them at the railing,
look down to see a dead man
at the bottom of car number fifty-three,
chest-high snow like a blanket,
a stubborn barnacle the paramedics
later break loose with a washdown hose.
“Second one this year,” the superintendent says,
dribbling tobacco juice into a styrofoam cup.
“Now get your asses back to work.”