This is the last time that I’ll sit
Slowly leafing through this log
Searching for a contact’s spark
To pierce my boredom’s lonely fog.

There’s hours when working in the mill
Seems like punishment for crime.
You’ve got a home and family
For that you’ve got to do your time.

It takes the strength of a serious man
To work on shift both day and night.
There’s character and dignity
In holding a job and doing it right.

But my time’s up, my Winter’s passed.
Though I hate to leave that steady pay
Spring’s lecherous tickling in my blood
Wont let me stay another day.

I take with me just a little money
But maybe more important still
I take a feeling of comradeship
With the men who remain and work at the Mill.

There isn’t much I can leave behind
As a legacy to share–
Just some contacts for a spark
To light the long nights in this chair.

1. Significator (the questioner): 2 of Pentacles

A man weighing or juggling two alternatives having to do with money

2. Cover and Cross (opposed forces now): 6 of Pentacles and Page of Swords

The just official giving money to the deserving poor [Unemployment insurance]

The young romantic knight of pain and truth [The Mill quest]

3. Crowning(outcome of conflict): King of Swords

The knight matured and sober

4. Beneath (background of present situation): 3 of Wands

Merchant watching ships embark (money-making schemes)

5. Behind (immediate past): Page of Pentacles

Youthful aesthete contemplating artistic beauty

6. Ahead: Emperor

King of Swords aged further, a land owner

7. Yourself: 2 of Swords

Stalemate, staying on the fence

8. House: The Hermit

Introspection, solitude, desiring a new direction

9. Hopes and Fears: The Fool

Letting Go, Abandon, Beginning

10. The Answer: 5 of Pentacles

Winter’s utter desolation, poverty, madness, cripples cut off from warmth, light and beauty
***
Another Tarot reading, two years earlier.

Shall I stay?
Shall I go?
Which will make
The spirit flow?
Do Graveyard’s skull
And bones disguise
God’s holy light
In bleary eyes?
If I remain
By my free will
Will Spring transform
This Wintry Mill?

It’s hard to let go of this weight.

My “graveyard” piece–story, essay, film–never materialized. Probably wont. I haven’t finished with “The Mill,” haven’t made much contact with the men who work here, haven’t learned a great deal about the production process, have only begun to understand the shiftwork experience.

As for influencing the place, that too is an aborted project. Right now two grindermen, Wayne and Bob, sit writing verse satires. They’re less depressed than any grindermen I’ve seen. So? My presence has stirred up hopes in them, but we’re all isolated; it wont add up to much. Bob and I were like brothers for a while. Now we have nothing to say to each other. The forcibly repressed background distinctions have surfaced.

I could have tried to make noise, but I never was able to decide what I wanted to change. I came to make money like the rest of the workers. There’s no sense of class oppression since there’s no ruling class in this town. Everyone is in the same boat. The necessity of having the job is a given. The only improvement conceivable is a little more money per hour, a few hours more overtime, a little less work per hour, a few more lightbulbs to steal.

So what do I want? To raise consciousness by creating discontent and at the same time provide my family with enough income to allow for a good life in the country. And to be able to express my own creative energy. I’d have to work here much longer and be less attached and self-involved to take any political role.

Though we still have no money in the bank and the only significant purchase allowed by my five months stint is an automatic washer, working in the Mill has cured me of financial anxiety. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I experienced a way of life motivated solely by that fear for long enough that I feel I dont need any more of it. I know the time I need to put in will come to an end for me, and though it’s been hell, that time hasn’t been lost. I learned that suffering has its rewards, the colder the winter the richer the spring, the longer on the job, the longer you can draw pogey.

Some day I want to write about what it feels like to get off graveyard: the slow deliberate ritual of cleanup with broom, air and water hose at the end of each shift; filling out your punch card and totalling what you’ve earned, always more satisfying than the paycheck with its heartless deductions; meeting your relief man, fresh from sleep and breakfast and tense while you’re stale and tired and loose; waiting for Bob in the roar of the steam plant; lighting the joint as you pull out of the parking lot; following the black-white track of snow on the powerline along the twisting highway; coasting the last four miles down from the summit; seeing the smoke from the stovepipe at the head of the clearing, blue against the tall firs as you walk up the driveway; the clank of the thermos in your empty lunch bucket, Ajax crowing in the chicken coop, frost outlining the jagged ends of roof shakes, the orange glow of the skylight, Janet feeding the baby in her chenille bathrobe next to the barrel stove, splitting the wood for the day in the half dark, eating a bowl of porridge and sinking into oblivion as night turns into day.

Hello Steven

I feel your 3AM weariness now, as I pack your food for graveyard. And I feel flooded with love for you. You give so much, and the rewards seem so small most of the time. When I came home today and saw the work you’d done with the house, and the light in Jonah’s eyes, I knew you. It meant so much and the dinner was so beautiful.

I feel moved by your love for order, for all the things that make our home hearth-warm and snow-moon clear. I want to tell you I love you–you are so beautiful to me–I know how hard your struggle is.

But two things always–to know struggle brings strength–to know we have the power to change the outward terms of struggle–but struggle continues always. As does love. I LOVE YOU.

HEY–wake up! Take vitamin C.

4-12 shift

The forbidden concept: divorce. What if it did happen? I would be free and full of pain and beauty and strength, instead of being trapped and full of pain and ugliness and weakness.

Yesterday I looked at the broken mirror in the locker door at work and saw myself blank, open, empty, free. When I came home at 12:30 she was up washing dishes. We got too drunk to get upstairs to bed. When the baby napped this morning she seduced me. The smell of billy goat on my hands mixed with the smell of armpits and the sound of an Indian flute, our energy young, dancing, touch without touching.

Here is a still life: the wheel thrown pot
Amidst the grids and graphs and charts
Scales and rule, calendar and clock
On the steel top desk in the pulp-test station.

There is still life in the centered cup
That holds the instant coffee I must drink
To keep apace the thrumming frequency
Of the sprawled electric death machine I serve.

There is still life in the ceramic mug
The elemental spirit of the hands
That mold with Nature’s art the water’s flow
The glaze of fire, the earthly body’s clay.

Still life
Soft frozen
In stone
With thumb
I feel.

4-12 shift

Husband’s Song

I wish that I could love you
With a boundless energy
I wish that I could move you
Like the storm wind moves the tree.

I know that every morning
You meet the other man
Who takes you on a voyage
To a distant foreign land.

Though I often try to follow
I’ve lost hope for the chance
To slip free from my burden
And join your silent dance.

When you two are departed
And I’m left here behind
I search the mirror for my face
With fear I’ll lose my mind.

I wish that I could love you
With a boundless energy
I wish that I could move you
Like the storm wind moves the tree.