The Grief of Mother Jones, and: Post-industrial, and: Nona’s Brief History of the Women’s Movement, and: To Write the Poem at Carrowmore, and: Mr. No Class, USA

The Grief of Mother Jones

. . . Mary Harris, who lost her iron-molder, union-organizer husband and four children in the yellow fever epidemic of 1867

I

By the time she’d nursed the last of them out of their suppurating bodies and into the cool, dry rest from which they had it seemed so briefly only inadvertently come, she had proliferated into woman after woman, seer, athlete, stoic, monk liar, mother, wife a multitude when it was over and everything burned, even to his collars, their shoes. Genius was corralling herselves each single one in the grip of its own sickness and facing them all the one way dark as the way they had come but noisier, the worst of it waxing, and writing the song, the words of which only they heard, walking, and the tune.

II

It was like being born every morning ––a blow and then a breath— eventually only the breath. Not that she thought of it this way. Not that she named it. Words tented the outside world,

the world within so sere a landscape nothing of the kind could grow, even had she dared plant again. Death is the agony, she knew, and there had been words in mind certain summer evenings, certain winter mornings, forgotten now, but not

that short of death, everything is life, and only once would it find her, only once the women with children, babies in their arms in gray blankets, and their gray-faced men.

III

At the Winesberg, run off company land, company roads, to keep her from the strikers who had sent for her.

words, her plain face and body in its rusty black silks.

she trod the public domain: doffing her button shoes and heavy black cotton stockings—in plain sight of the bosses—

she set foot into a winter stream and walked its ice coals, her dry boots in her hand, her hat like a godly task piled onto her head, and, balancing.

passed them, posthumous as she was— untouchable, judgment-proof— nothing left of her but an offering that had the once possible lifetime come back posted addressee unknown, and she a woman unaccustomed to waste.

Post-industrial

We saw the weave room in winter. We two the only museum-goers. A stairwell skirled up floor beyond floor. Not

much of the rest of Lowell was such red brick, so tended. Out of two hundred, ten looms thundered.

We mimed our meanings to each other, big-eyed, pushing the yellow sponge- plugs into our ears. Above, below, the rooms were.

loomless, silent, but here the blows treadled the floor. Thread wants hot, wet air. Comfy today, thread breaks

easily, but the girl working won’t be docked, won’t be jerked off her feet by the hair if she’s careless, won’t be bedded by the boss if she

means to keep the job. ProlapseUteri a common complaint, I feel the flow, the rags, five thirteen-hour days out of seven, one of eight. Outdoors,

gray December, the canals frozen, Labor a rusted wheel here or there with a plaque. First the looms went south

then back where the immigrants came from to work them, now back from there to greener pastures still: so pretty a world once—an indigent young girl—so slight, passing.

Nona’s Brief History of the Women’s Movement

nothing not an inch not thread gained that was not wrested away in a scene of public ridicule

To Write the Poem at Carrowmore

Coarse grass up to my armpits and dense as virile headhair on a hero

and days’ rain equally relentless cows you’d come upon wading

onto them and the rock graves ancient, sunken, scored with millennia

of lichen and I crawled in, down as if to find a great poem inside

as if I were a finger in the dike and the first, at that...