The Order in Which We Do Things: The Poetry of Tom Wayman

The Old Power

The Old Power The old power is still here: pulling into work one morning to find the access road to the company parking lot jammed with men and vehicles, more cars piling up behind, spilling out onto the main street and down adjacent lanes, everybody arriving from different directions to stand together at the gate of the almost-empty lot (just a few foremen’s cars and the night shift of painters) where five men from the company’s sales and service division on strike for more than a month now stand with their picket signs. Early morning dark, and a cold rain. Five men with sheets of cardboard looped around their necks changing feet to keep warm, drinking coffee from the small white cups somebody brought them: five men in a line, occasionally talking to someone else but mostly just standing at the very edge of company property and then a little space and then all four hundred of us, mixed in with our lunchpails and boots and the cars that brought us here. Like an old myth that suddenly works: a marvelous event in a forest that happens to you personally so that again you can believe in what you once had clung to and then abandoned: five sheepish men in the rain at the end of a road hold back our hundreds. And this is something both of us make: they carrying the symbol out in front of us and we agreeing. So whatever happens here is ours. After half an hour in the drizzle, the sky getting lighter, not a supervisor or foreman in sight, 8 / The Order in Which We Do Things some of us wander off to the Lougheed Hotel for coffee. Then, I drive home. And all the while the five men stand there like pillars of the old power, an idea made flesh, an idea that works. So that today, Thursday, no one has to build a single truck and we can take all the rest of this day in the rain for ourselves. The Poetry of Tom Wayman / 9 ...