Letter to a Younger Poet

for James Quinton

The men who sweep the floors

james k. baxter

So Bon worked at the fertiliser factory.So did I. csbp at Kwinana on The Sound.O bird shit, O volcanic sulphur. The singing acid.I spent a lot of my youth sweeping thingsout of railway wagons: old grain, chunksof super after I’d broken it up—set likeconcrete—with a sledgehammer.So Bon and I did the season,twenty years apart. Slow release.Phosphate burning never passesand pickles us in its grave. It doesn’tmake you grow. Ah, guano, ah, fertile Nauru:you will echo in this country down the track:Pacific Solution. Makes phosphated bonescreak. And rock phosphate from the islandwhere the unwanted are now incarcerated.Interception point for flotillas and squadrons,the militarisation of birds. The fishingvillage turned to green fields. Odd greenthough. The acid trips we consumedon the high seas of unemploymentwere wonders of strychnine: feral control.All your Christmases coming at once:plenty of lame jokes to pass an eternity. O Phosphate Island Company!Conradian! So exquisitely literary.(And now it’s Western Sahara and Morocco:you can sort the Euro-arts imperial precedents).Sulphuric acid is a celebration of the skin.Retrieval at temperatures count, mate.Lashings of coherence. Burning men. All men back then.From sheds on farms (as kids we quarried,tunnelled and sculpted mountains),through top-dressing and seeding.But for decades I’ve rejected its stench:the river choked with algal blooms:the runoff we write out of ourselves,watch dribble into the storm drains.Our contradictions don’t add up:tare weight of the load travellingthird-tier lines to depots.Now it’s mainly by truck.I took the season because Mum’sboyfriend, Jim, rigger and scaffolder,worked there. Jim wanted me to straightenout. And I had drug debts to pay.A girlfriend and ‘getting a life.’Most of my pay went on gettingout of it. The great tower at the centreof the factory was topped with navigationlights: Jim often worked high on its roundwalls. A landmark. A funhouse.Highlife. Up in the clouds.Chemical warfare: to make growwith a zest the earth doesn’t dole outevenly (I was getting off the dole).Also there: just after my time, that Midas touch:sodium cyanide (gold gold gold),and later, ammonium nitratefor blowing up mountains of iron.Toxicity was the washing machine, the uniforms you handed backwhen the season finished.Heart and soul of industry.Trace element nutrient field testingsoil fertility profile modellingalien as suburb to suck in falloutlike hydro which was just showingup around then, or amphetaminego-getter injected in ammoniated toilets,confusable with powders rainingdown from clothes, hair, environs: the cut.In the cribroom the eating ritualwas slow and defeated thoughthe foreman built up his musclesand talked bodies and admired the bicepsof a fellow labourer-stoner whose physiquewas a setup, melting awayas much as any one of us.Trace element nutrient field testingsoil fertility profile modellingalien as suburb to suck in fallout.Jim, God rest his soul, truly saw thisas my effort to sort my shit out.He had his good reputation and I workedfull-on. Literally. Moonwalkingacross the asphalt, the big chemical school.And the shit I blew the foreman’s petout with had him dancing in the steelbelly of a railway wagon, a sparklyclean job we’d hammered, shovelled, and swept,and then he was superman all overagain, demonstrating a childhood leapand falling between wagons. Broken leg. True.And my season was to end a month laterwhen I was caught up in a ‘pub fight’over a pool table and a ‘kiss my arse’mouthed to a bikie by a mate who ducked and covered, and stood back to watch the show—the fertilisation—left me standing with a cuein my hand, which then liberated itselfand broke my arm. The...