Raw Goods Inventory

Telluric

telluric The valley’s blue and steely-snow was a relief to the eyes. To those workers in mine-black soot, who slugged away at the veins, and deeper still, hit gas pockets or water, the job was better than nothing at all. : : : Something’s hit anyway, fortune-craze, up hard. Because one body was expected to do the work of ten, and every one needed to get ahead. Boys skinny as goats sent in the narrowest cracks, forget the canaries that died. Many tangled, knees to chest, if lucky, got pulled out later once noticed missing. : : : After the mines, it was the blast furnace, the pig iron’s liquid orange—devil’s pit, end-all. Faces bronzed, cracked, early-aged. Relief was not a part of it, though the valley’s snow 55 and steely-blue relieved the eyes, but then how do I know? I was a stray American. The metallurgical plants were all that were hiring. Bethlehem Steel, Appalachian coal mines, or the Gary factories. No one had much : : : choice. In what we learned it was mostly invention of the coke ovens, difference between bituminous and anthracite—the dollars of industry. Never steel fabrication, accident or accident, strikes, Molly Maguires, slow burn. The ruinous conclusion of land after strip— slag, the shoddy heap of refineries, sludge, toxic runoff. Never the what-to-do-with-it-after. : : : For all the engineering feats and safety measures, it was the snow that consoled our blue-steeled eyes. Some sight. The skin nettled by winter’s clench, the outlying hills filling in 56 white. Steam pit, wholesale consumption, jackpot, laughing stock— moles, blacked, of the earth. : : : Under ground, I am mineral, I am ghost. The mine shaft’s walls glint silver. My heart is in my ear, I am headlamp shine to see. All insides, all pit. 57 ...