Lund 1970’s

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (10)

Thursday, January 6th, 1972

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.

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (11)

Thursday, January 6th, 1972

January 6 1972, graveyard shift

Smokebreak

Now I remember
Your dancer’s head suspended
Your hands composed and slender
Your tongue tip
Tracing tender
Tendrils on
My lower lip.

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (12)

Saturday, January 8th, 1972

January 8 1972, graveyard shift

Song

Pursued by a question
I found a closed book
That said on its cover
Don’t open and look.

Like Eve at the apple
I gazed a long time
While the serpent of doubt
Egged me on to the crime.

I spread forth the pages
I took the sweet bite
But the morsel turned bitter
As the words came to light.

I couldn’t stop reading
Despite the hot pain
In the slash those words burned
From my eye to my brain.

I love you, they screamed
To the man sent away,
It was just for the others
That I made my display.

But I know and you know
And they know it too
All trapped in a lie
We must live to be true.

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (13)

Saturday, January 8th, 1972

January 8, 1972 graveyard shift

Winter Dance

The spirit flows freely when the vessels are cleansed by pain
The heart pours forth music from suffering it cannot contain
The pleasure we treasure when scratching the itch of desire
Can move us in circles but lacks the refinement of fire.

La da da da da, da da da da
La da da da da, da da da da

Love is our crime and our trial and our punishing scourge
We trespass our limits and violate time when we merge
That explosive fusion erases the rest of mankind
And when it is finished the vacuum leaves nothing behind.

La da da da da, da da da da
La da da da da, da da da da

The sins of the father are visited upon the son
And each generation will bury the preceding one
When Adam and Eve stole the apple from off the green tree
They crucified Jesus for all of eternity.

La da da da da, da da da da
La da da da da, da da da da

winterdance1.jpg

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (14)

Tuesday, January 11th, 1972

1

Your love is more than I deserve
Let me learn to treasure it
Without greed
Like the sinner loves his God
Who punishes
And cherishes his pain
Let me cherish pain
To purify my heart
That it may be transformed
Into a worthy sacrifice
To you.

2

Love me dirty, love me lewd
Keep your clothes on in the nude
Turn me inside out with lust
Send juices flowing through the crust
Of frazzled nerves and leathered skin
That locks my languished spirit in.

3

The worker’s goddess is his wife
The only meaning in his life.
To dignify his slavery
He raises her to high degree
Surrounds her with a million things
Home and kids and diamond rings.
When he’s about to lose his head
He remembers her in bed.
Lost his soul to please his Lord
Wielder of the mighty sword.

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (15)

Monday, January 17th, 1972

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

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (20)

Tuesday, February 15th, 1972

Letter in a Lunch Bucket

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.

jancrochet.jpg

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (21)

Wednesday, February 23rd, 1972

This is my last graveyard. Sitting in Bob’s car this morning, off shift and waiting to go home, I decided to give notice. Called in this afternoon.

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.

shiftcleanup.jpg

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.

stevenjonahasleep.jpg

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (22)

Saturday, February 26th, 1972

No longer feeling trapped here makes me want to stay. I think of the Christmas tree brought by the Grindermen, decorated with industrial lightbulbs and pieces of dried pulp, the newsprint draped from grinder to grinder, the times of whooping and hollering and singing in the grinderroom. I think of Tiny Beacon and his ex-army hockey-ref gung-ho marching spirit, of the old timers and their bitter sense of the company’s change from a local enterprise to a multinational giant, of the discipline I’ve developed to manage shiftwork, of the intimations I’ve felt on graveyard. But then I remember what the job is doing to our marriage: how it forces me to make demands on Janet that crowd and threaten her, how it takes our space and time, how it’s cut me off from Jonah…and I feel undecided and in need of outside counsel.

The Mill: A Winter Pastoral (23)

Saturday, February 26th, 1972

Tarot Question

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?