Yew Street Basement

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

January 6 1972, graveyard 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.

December 21, 1971 Day Shift

Solstice

Sap down, morning dark
Rooster sleeps, infant coughs, wife groans
Stove cold, pipes froze, truck stuck
Uncoffied and late to work.

Screen Tender empties sewer samples
“Goundwood down for cleanup
Pollution controls suspended
Today we flush the system out.”

Thousands of gallons of woodpulp and bleach
Zinc hydrosufite, sodium sulfate
Slosh through the flume into the saltchuck
Pablum for fish, heavily spiced.

In the Towncrier photo the Forestry Superintendant
Stands proud on the butt of a thousand year old fir
They’ve finished logging the old growth grove at Goat Lake.
It was one of the last virgin stands near the coast of B.C.

Cruised, felled, limbed, bucked
Skidded yarded, loaded, trucked
Dumped, boomed, sorted, tugged
Towed, spiked, barted, lugged.
Ripped, slashed, cross-cut.

Pulped, shredded, screened
Bleached, tested, cleaned
Blended, thickened, died
Rolled, pressed, dried
Wound, rewound, finished.

The Times is all that’s left
For breakfast.

When darkness holds dominion here tonight
We’ll find and cut a sapling hemlock tree
To celebrate renewal of the light
And hope for rebirth of the land and sea.

23 November 1971, Graveyard Shift

Grinderman’s Blues

It’s three o’clock in the morning
On a rainy Saturday night
I’m up at this ungodly hour
But I’m not even stoned or tight.
I’m a gruntin’ and a groanin’
Though I know that it just ain’t right
I’m stuck on this fuckin’ grinder
Until the dawnin’ light.

I’ve got those heavy, tombstone, graveyard grinderman’s blues

And when that mornin’ finally comes
I drag-ass home to sleep
My bedroom window’s boarded up
The daylight out to keep.
But in my mind that grinder churns
It never stops or slows
Instead of wood against the stone
I dream I push my nose.

I’ve got those heavy, tombstone, graveyard grinderman’s blues

When I wake up it’s dark again
And I need a piece of tail
But my wife she says, go chop some wood
And empty the garbage pail.
So I do as I’m told, I pick up the axe
And go out in the evenin’ chill
Cause heftin’ and heavin’ those logs for the stove
Is good practise for work at the mill.

I’ve got those heavy, tombstone, graveyard grinderman’s blues

18 November 1971
4-12 shift

I think this is what Plato’s Diotima means: the succeeding generations we procreate are like the recurrent memories of a real experience lost to time. Each generates the future in hopes of recapturing the past. Remembering, we approach, but also recede from what is remembered. We, our parents, and our offspring–lost relatives in search of the absolute.

Amchitka

In a corner of her backyard in L.A.
My mother-in-law waters the young Bougainvilla
She bought to hide the green steel hatch
Of the bomb shelter her son no longer uses
To make out in with Shirley Jingles.

From their underground bower of bliss
They would gaze at a frozen sunset
Framed in a grainy picture window
Sized colour photograph.

Shouldering an ancient pike pole
I walk the flume on day shift
Poke, pry jammed chunks
Freeing the flow of wood to the grinders
Where butchered forests are chomped into gruel
To feed the mighty nine and ten
That roll forth tree-trunk spools of newsprint.

Not now…
The season of apocalypse is over
The sun will not eclipse again
Until this decade ripens.

Just planting and harvest
Just nuts and bolts.

November 6 1971

first paycheck

logpond grapple

bucksaw

the flume

the flume

27 June 1971

Jonah struggles to turn over and move himself: growth is rebellion against limitation, breaking the shackles of helplessness, violent, explosive, full of rage, strain, frustration.