Working Words

As I was driving to work before sunrise this morning, after spending the better part of 5 days working with wood and dirt in my back yard, I turned off National Public Radio and opened the car window so that premature bits of sunlight could come in. I was not especially happy to return to the office, but it was today's responsibility. I was trying to think of what to write here (or whether to write anything at all), and here's the first sentence that came to me:

One of the college courses I sometimes teach is centered around literature of and about the workplace--you know, where you spend so much time often wishing you were someplace else.

Knowing, of course, that I could not stop with a single sentence, I sat down tonight and belched some more. They go like this.

If, like me, you spend many hours in a corporate cubicle, maybe you decorate your walls. I have a picture of my wife pinned to one wall, and I have two buttons; one button reads "Another Writer for Peace," and the other button reads "Another Veteran for Peace." On the door to my filing cabinet, I have photographs of Yosemite, snow camping, backpacking, back-country skiing, and Martha's Vineyard. I don't have any poetry, though I do use some words from one version or another of Magnetic Poetry to keep my photographs in place.

In the class I teach, we examine not just poetry but also short stories and essays that, thematically, relate to the workplace. Some of the poems are written by people you might have heard of: Marge Piercy ("To Be of Use"), Carl Sandburg ("The Dynamiter"), and Theodore Roethke ("Old Florist"). But, frankly, the textbook I have to use is lousy--thin on content, short on relevance to the students.... So, sometimes, I sneak other works into the course. For example, Phillip Levine. He is not only one of my favorite contemporary poets, he's actually written entire books that contain nothing but work-related poetry--such as What Work Is. Most of Levine's poems are, however, a bit too long for me to type accurately, so I'll provide just a few stanzas from his work.

You Can Have It

My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.

The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.

Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,

and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labors, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?

. . . . . .

Growth

In the soap factory where I worked
when I was fourteen, I spoke to
no one and only one man spoke
to me and then to command me
to wheel the little cars of damp chips
into the ovens. While the chips dried
I made more racks, nailing together
wood lath and ordinary screen
you'd use to keep flies out, racks
and more racks each long afternoon,
for this was a growing business
in a year of growth....

. . . . . .

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another....

I also bring in something different, a Sandburg poem that is not in our authorized text. I'm not a big fan of Sandburg, but, like Levine, he uses a language common to most of us. Here's one of his complete poems (from Chicago Poems).

Working Girls

The working girls in the morning are going to work--long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.

Each morning as I move through this river of young-woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all going, so many with a peach bloom of young years on them and laughter of red lips and memories in their eyes of dances the night before and plays and walks.

Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and so here are always the others, those who have been over the way, the women who know each one the end of life's gamble for her, the meaning and the clew, the how and the why of the dances and the arms that passed around their waists and the fingers that played in their hair.

Faces go by written over: "I know it all, I know where the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories," and the feet of these move slower and they have wisdom where the others have beauty.

So the green and the gray move in the early morning on the
downtown streets.

There is, of course, always something more to say. Perhaps tomorrow.