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Furnace - Poem
Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by David Salner
I think of it as a lake of yellow steel breaking the darkness--almost spectral, sizzling with waves that bake your skin. I toss in fist-sized rocks of iron, manganese and chrome and shut the door on the light. Nightshift passes like a drunk. A man hoists trays of heavy molds onto a shelf and groans. He lifts all night, all night he groans. A spotter pushes a giant magnet through the air and signals the craneman, just so, to release a ton of steel upon two skinny rails that bend, then hold. The spotter wails in celebration or in curse--who knows?--into the midnight caverns of the plant. I watch the slinger crew conclude their awkward dance. Low-man cleans up. He pushes the leftover sand (so harsh to breathe) into piles then through a pit on to a ceaseless belt. Too tired to make small talk, my partner tells me how two young guys died-- brothers, they were pouring on the wheel, when one guy dropped his ladle on the ground below. He passed out from the heat into the ankle-deep spill. His brother stepped in, started to go down ... My partner's voice trails off in the fluorescent buzz of the lunchroom, but I see them, two boys splashing in a pond of yellow steel, until the wheel crew pulls them out. The burn unit wrapped them in someone else's skin for two days, when their lungs gave out. All men look like devils in the furnace light. The furnace tender was a sorcerer as well with me as his apprentice, stumbling around the ten-ton room that holds the light. I don't remember the sorcerer's name but he left the Pima reservation when the mines shut down, and loved to play softball even in a Phoenix summer. He nails a short branch on a twenty-foot trunk of tree and gestures for me to take hold of it. "There isn't much to slagging a furnace ... Be careful." And then the door opens, and the lake seems to lean toward me bright yellow in the visor-green. I run the tree into the glowing center and skim the golden coals of slag from the sizzling waves, back and forth, like raking a lawn. "Good enough!" my partner hits my shoulder, "Come on!" Once in the parking lot, we wake up from the nightmare-hours to the red sun rising through palm trees in a little park. A thin mist wreaths the paddle boats and shabby dock of the duck pond. Behind us, the foundry smokes and shrieks. We slump over our beers, gray as ghosts, and wonder where we'll be next year. Most will get better jobs, and some (like me) get hurt. But if you're tough enough to stick it out you'll get laid off when the plant shuts down. We see the future, each and every ghost. Then I drive home up Baseline Avenue past the Japanese flower farms crowding the new air with acres of petals. I try to shut the light out of the house and pull the sheets over my skin, glad that it's cool enough to sleep. I think about a tree, the tamarack, that never burns. I skim it over sizzling waves and reach into the lake of yellow steel. Hours later, the afternoon light splashes me awake. We are not ghosts! We fight to break the spell!
David Salner, a machinist living in Frederick, Maryland, has had his poems published in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and Borderlands
COPYRIGHT 2001 Fairleigh Dickinson University
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
