Читать книгу Thresholds and Other Poems - Matt Hohner - Страница 19

Dundalk

Slow burn of rust across the eyelids of old men

decades out of the plant, rooted on torn leather stools

in the darklight at Minnick’s, underneath the shadows

of the Seagram’s plant’s hulking brickwall desolation

and splintered floors echoing junkies and johns having sex.

A left shoe soaking in the rain out back of Penn Central,

where the creosote odor of rotting ties wraps around

a white wooden cross, Too Soon inscribed across its chest,

poking stark like bones out of the needles and potato chip bags

in the trackside weeds. A three-legged mongrel tightens

at the end of its chain in a dirt yard, barks all night

at trains rumbling slowly east past tenements and tents,

pounding through the neighbors’ alcohol sleep.

A wet easterly breath off the water, carrying the sewage

stench of the treatment plant, mudflats of dumped tires

at low tide, the dry hack of toxic dust over Bear Creek

from the tailings of Sparrows Point’s last convulsive blasts

of furnace and steel, over mercury sludge hiding enough crabs

for someone to pull out on chicken necks, steam for dinner,

ignore the metallic taste, swig it down with beer.

The children raise themselves in anger and show up

for school doped on mom’s pills, unshowered and late,

cussing like absentee longshoremen fathers they never met,

hope flickering there behind dark inlets of eyes seeking love,

heartbeats begging routine, arms flailing for a hug

and punching at walls they cannot see. Tough.

Scratch it. Underneath the skin, Job’s blood courses

through lava veins where it is still warm, the soul breathing,

singing in joy at dawn for the promise of another day,

clamoring through all the damage to a heart still beating

to the rhythm of lunar ebbs, shift whistles, stirring to the sound

of acrid cloudsmoke scraping across an impossible sky.