The glow of its single high intensity headlamp
Cutting into the light morning mist,
The orange-streaked black Chessie diesel
Joins two companions
Rolling coal down riverside tracks.
The black glow of strip-mined coal reflects
Almost-sunlight heaped above the top
Of the hell-stained, steel-wheeled boxes
Whose sides
Bear splotches of aged-blood corrosion.
Light thunder rises from the rails:
Thunder come to earth
Along tracks decorated by the mist
Of wind-blown coal-dust
And occasional gravels
Of the soft, light bituminous.
A sulfur ghost tinges the river,
Touching the memory of a blood-red stream
Twenty mine-open years ago
At a moment of corrosive prosperity.
The ghost has receded,
     A shade of itself
Living on in a few uncleaned memories
     Whose open red swamps
Are hidden by reforested hills.
The subtle pollution of 1984 air
Enriched by the fumes of my pickup
Masks whatever sulfur odor now rises from the West Fork,
     Safely upstream from the Marion County death fields,
     Upstream from the bleeding ghosts of miners' tombs
                                 Deep beneath the hills,
     Upstream from Worthington, Mannington, Farmington,
Blessedly upstream.

4/19/84

Index     Christmas in Clarksburg