Dawn, Third Shift
Today in the PEN Poetry Series, PEN America features a poem by Joe Hall.
Dawn, Third Shift
Printing textbooks is a heavy responsibility, but Von Hoffmann Corporation has the muscle to do the job.
In the production a spade
the bell sounds swallow
the circular stage
singing myself into ramps and those ramps
fasten flags to an axle
along fields a sky trades
to the motel running parallel
to paradise, the people
talking pussy or cock on the conveyor line
walking the arabesque
changing ways cross the inlet
down sand sun kill
spilling maps from every pore
macadam slides over Baltimore
then split this work to satisfy the demands of infinity
to think here, in this factory, again of you
you in the swollen firewalls
love departed
without a face
down to the river
the wind eaves double
a small crime under a higher tide
where each actor is alone
where the fire was shame
and servitude: the other glory
in such inundation—from the automatic equipment
cascades of warm constellations, joy rampaging
under a sycamore leaf in a deer’s casing
old house shakes
floors up a mountain
at the hip of an industrial compactor
the yet unlit river
walks glad we’d found someone
to collapse the old suture, poor neighborhoods
Laguna Vista, La Caverna, New
Orleans—white people lit by naked steel
where flocks of data caw against the rain
the manufactory work floor, the walls
stumble through beer cans on the lawn
look up into the light, the paradise to come
meat in topiary shapes will not weep, swaddled
in burlap, the nursery bed
transplanting popular pleasure
into the form of the house in the form of the street
I am the manager’s office, I am Mr. Jupiter
I receive the box and stack it up
you follow a poem, weeping, into the reeds
the paradise a greenhouse growing
into what we can shutter— drag
an eighteen wheeler, whatever furniture
a picture a jellied piece
don’t forget words receive
I as much to stones and stumps
a chalk mark on the resurrection belt
of the blade, its tight housing turns aside
men and women, to watch it shear
flower, delicately, to dwell
means to leave so many alone
to be called cruel
like bowls open alive
between your arms but it flowers
where I can butcher a place
in bridges and rancid gold foil
all the casings where you want I see him
or “stuffed clouds” in the tank your eye my lips
10 on the shift in the palace of grime
in pictures in his underwear feeding
shined behind high up
light floating into a machine
—with fire and flood menacing
the enormous need—to step
into the shower, I should have showered
so much carnage, joy en bloc
you were struck by scalding water
light without warmth
comfort without pleasure
heaven poured gasoline over
what does our distance mean?
the drive up Rt. 5
waiting in work clothes
I’m sure you understand it
so give it to me
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