I am staring into memory,
Plucking an image from the mosaic fragments
That jumble dreams and past,
And looking at a dump truck,
A battered yellow single-axle Chevrolet,
Sitting beneath a rusting sheet-metal coal tipple,
Catching slag,
As a red tandem GMC, one of a slow string,
Backs up the wooden ramp, dumps, and pulls back down,
And the rail car behind the tipple
Slowly fills with coal.

Stonewood was dirty in those days,
The grime of coal tipples and welding shops,
The slag-roughened streets,
Orbiting grit about the big Pittsburgh Plate Glass Plant
Which provided employment for all lucky enough
To avoid the black hazards of the mines.

 The big tipple between the cutoff and Phillipi
Was busy in those days,
Coal pouring down a long conveyer from the hills,
Fleets of trucks hauling in more coal,
And an old green Ford tandem dump
Hiding in the weeds at the edge of a gravel lot
With newer trucks thundering in and out before it.

Anthropomorphism or silly sentimentality,
Finding curious affection for things mechanical --
And only the dead ones:
Only the ones run to death
Or relegated, in old age, to duty as scrap bins,
I imagine they know stories,
Have mosaics of their own,
And shards of life linked to the rust hole
At the side of the fender, directly behind the headlight
Or the slight dent creasing the hard metal door.

I've read too many children's picture books,
As that broken headlight appears a wounded, sightless eye
And that shattered windshield indicates the truck
Has been reduced to a carcass.
I claim visions of the unburied dead
In the frame of that engineless International,
Paint flaking from the shiny black fenders,
Red cab faded to a flat near-brown, rust abounding,
Sitting on the sulfur-ruined roadside
Beneath a highwall, shading a few sparse blades
Of hardy, opportunistic grass.

12-7-99
 

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