Loon Lake

16

Certain contracts having quietly been made in mountains

certified convicts having mislaid their companions

I direct you eight hundred Mercator miles west

to the autobody works on the flat landscape

dawn whitening the frost on the corrugated shed roofs

the smokeless stacks the endless chain-link fence

the first trolley of the morning down Division Street

discharges workers in caps and open jackets but not workers.

The pickets roused from their sleep huddled by steel-drum fires

the cops awakened in their cars rubbing their misted windshields

the second trolley of the morning tolls down Division Street

discharges workers or workers at first glance

but somehow not resembling the strikers grouping uneasily

in front of the main gates of the autobody works.

The cops make calls from phoneboxes on the corners

the third trolley of the morning grinding its flanged wheels

on Division Street stopping the arrivals stepping down now

seen in the light their expressions of newly purchased loyalty

appearing as an unaccustomed cause in their shrewd appraising eyes

the insignia of their dereliction, jackets with pockets of pints

shoes tied around with rope, medals of filth,

mercenaries with callused fingers discovering

the cobblestones pried so easily

by ones and twos and hefted as many as until the tracks

of the trolleys of Division Street stand up from unpaved beds.

Open trucks arrive filled with the faces not of workers.

This army can take the city apart and put it back together

if it so wishes or perhaps wrap the electrified lines

stringing the utility poles overhead around each individual striker

until he may go self-powered into eternity.

Cops start patrol-car engines drive quietly away

certain black sedans now arrive between arrivals

of the crowded streetcars and trucks some men in overcoats appearing

among the seeming workers resembling only slightly now the pickets

with the eyes of lepers staring at them

no saints present on this wet gray morning to kiss them,

so numerous now they do not even have to look at whom they will face

when they walk over them into the plant and throw the switches.

And primly planning the action deploying forces

is a slim and swarthy man in overcoat and pearl-gray fedora

a dark-eyed man short but very well put together

friend of industrialists, businessman who keeps his word

and capable of a gracious gesture under the right conditions.

Only now, as with a gloved hand he beckons one of the strikers

an aged man with white hair and rounded shoulders

who has called out brothers don’t do this to your brothers

to meet him between the lines alone in no man’s land

does a small snapshot of rage light his brain.

He impassively demonstrates the function of the cobblestone

a sudden event on the workingman’s skull who has met him

surprised now at the red routes of death mapped on his forehead

turning to share this intelligence with his brothers

hand lifted too late as the signal for the engagement to begin.