American Steel
I. Fire
The furnace roars; its maw crows for
Ore and carbon. The earthy smeltery –
Ash, smoke, sweat – floods the senses.
The bright hole burns the undisciplined eye.
Unquenchable heat. This is not Hades,
Though a miner, laborer, millwright,
Foreman might disagree, say, after some
Uncontrolled act of physics, some beam,
Ladle, or hoist snuffs out a man, his love
Line ended in unredeemable loss.
No. This is the crucible of progress, the
Motor of growth, the creator of
The bony frames of cities that will live
For two centuries and more, before and after
Nylon and silicon, without which nylon
Nor silicon, oil nor chips, would exist.
Sing then, the carrying up out of the
Earth of black and rusty treasures, the
Passages of coal on barges down great
Rivers, the generations of people, men and
Women who make and move this chain.
For it is of the People we sing,
The people feeding the coke fires, shaping
The ingots into beams, girders, columns,
Plate, re-bar, all to be cut, drilled, fastened
By tools shaped, hardened, and tempered
By and of the very stuff: anvil and swage,
Micron-precise cutters and gauges. The waste
Streams of slag and ash, tailings,
And sludge; and men, worn out and coldly used.
II. Horse
There was a saying in the West, in the
Badlands, the loamy prairie, the cold and
Rocky peaks, the treacherous torrents requiring
And inviting passage by scouts, pioneers,
Settlers, bankers, marshals: “The only
Good Indian is a dead Indian.”
This fearful parable served the Wasichu,
Those fair-skinned peoples in lust with the
Yellow metal. Riding their iron
Horses on tongues of rail and spike that flowed
From the East like lava rivulets, flowed
On timbers lain down by Oakland Chinese,
These hardened immigrants carved out homesteads,
Their rough hands and tongues hewing and taming
Creation in the American way.
This was the beginning – the Golden
Spike, the telegraph its messenger – of
Eight score years and more, imperial
Power, hard won and hard-defended,
The steel underpinning of the Pax.
III. War Machine
After San Jacinto, Chickamauga,
Appomattox and Manila Bay,
This continental power threw off its
Reluctance for foreign entanglements,
The Old World’s wars, and entered a new century.
The men of steel answered the call, foundries
And factories humming, iron carts plying the streets
For surplus frypans – bring out your metal – and
We did, fueling the tooling and gun barrels,
Axles and actions, bolts and sights, engines.
These pieces ensnared the treasure of the
Race, youths late of Wexford, Surrey, Saxony,
Booneville, Omaha, Kyoto, Kunming, Lucca,
Marseille; Navajo and Buffalo soldiers;
Women and children left behind; ally and
Enemy indistinguishable in
Suffering and death. Within this current
Of conquest and defeat, bravery and
Bravado, passion and illusion, ran
A certain lineage, military men.
IV. Spine
for my father
Scots at first, then Irish, sternly mothered
And well taught, these clans booked passage
West and South, finding verdant woodlands,
Craggy hollows, in what became Kentucky
And later, Arkansas, serving in the
Local regiments, fighting and falling
Against what brother or cousin wore a
Different color. Some, toughened in fire,
Or bored or scared by the vagaries of
Banking or medicine, chose duty, country.
One such hombre, tuning to the rituals,
Sabre and step, leadership and command,
And the common vices of the soldier’s life,
Became an airman, the wild blue
In his eyes. Air mail service
The early days of flight, ferrying
Materiel over flak, over
The Himalayas, planning for nukes
In Korea, he kept well-oiled the Colt
.32 issued to general officers.
One Winter afternoon an aircraft
Overran its runway, crumpled
Into shallow woods. Girding himself,
The senior officer made haste
To the impromptu clearing where men
Were losing an argument with jetfuel’s
Orange tongue. That day the sidearm coaxed
A fire chief back into the broken bomber,
The malevolent payload asleep
In its belly known but to few.
V. Crucible
Comes now the time, the peak of empire
That presages its fall. The rough beast
Slouches her last. Nuance loses shape
Beneath the acrid whine of the
Surface grinder, the hot saw. No mere
Sharpening stone. Civilization,
Wire-brushed to bare metal, twists,
Crumples under its own weight.
What is left, emergent? What phoenix? A
Turnaround, cannibalized by start-ups . . . .
Blockchain, quantum computing, graphene’s
Tessellated hexagons, CRISPR:
The metamorphoses of science and
Religion, business and pleasure, art,
Communications, memory, trust,
Intelligence, consciousness itself.
Silicon and carbon are coming,
Together. The unity of opposites.
Yin and yang are on a spectrum. Into
This fray our better natures are called to ride,
To walk, among those intent upon
Destruction. No land of our own to claim
In this time of turmoil and fear, we live
In the lands of the warring parties.
The refiner’s fire toughens and anneals
Our weapons of compassion, and insight.
Born with that yonder look in my heart’s eyes
Born in a land of freedom and of power,
I’m taken alive in this defining hour
To quell the sword, and call: dear Love, arise.
Oakland, July 2019