Maida Cummings, Your Call Is Very Important to Us, Photograph
GAFFERS
Gaffers thrived downwind
watching rakers and burners
hustle the mass to flame and smoke,
a sort of veil, and the road from town
to dump was aromatic as a censer.
Smouldering irreparable shoes,
the funnies with iconic cartoons,
Life, Colliers, Look, the Sears Catalog
stolid cartons: dead cats, dogs,
deer bones, mice, rats in traps,
worn, torn shirts without buttons, fish
guts, leaky rubber boots, silent canaries,
leather trimmings from the shoe factory
down river, our butcher’s renderings
and offal, kotex, rafts of maggots,
murders of crows aloft, no polite
dioxins, furans, polycyclic hydrocarbons,
no lung high heavy metals
suffusing the debut of plastic.
The edge of the half-filled crater
was a lookout over bulldozed redolence
harmlessly seeping, sour and weak,
while geezers watched the gathered evidence
get slathered by wide blades, the mass
sliding from ordinary dump trucks,
later from hoppers that flap like tongues
ass end of White Company’s aerodynamic
bodies, scootched, defecating downslope
to Help Keep Your City Clean.
Gaffers materialized, rubbing their hands,
thumbing gums, refugees of Eden, or
Gomorrah, to see what’s left of Paradise,
what offerings had been laid down for them
to appraise, items at the edge of salvation.
Their noses sniffed, honked, twitched for
Copenhagen, heads full of enterprise, mouths
fouled: rot-gut whisky, Gallo by the gallon,
canned Prince Albert, strong coffee and tooth rot.
Didn’t they grieve at night, appear in the a.m.
with angelically white, red beaked gulls?
Some of the rest of us came some evenings
for a bear to show up, dig in, eyes sparking,
faithful to garbage in our headlights
where these geezers (we called them) shifted
from foot to foot, to prod with staffs, say
the say, hum like Druids, meanwhile watch
the new age, gravid, funereal bags
tumble from the laboring trucks,
bags that leave them empty, forlorn,
recalling their lives as modest failure
remembering the floor lamps to be rewired,
busted chairs re-glued, an endless assortment
of collectible bottles: green glass Coke, blue,
bubbled Moxie Nerve Food, Dr. Daniel’s Blackberry
Balsam with 1 grain of opium …a tsp.to quiet
a colicky child, or put a school-marm to sleep
and dream, or the whole bottle down the throat
of a horse suffering green grass bloat, to make it
throw up, shit a pile and stay on its feet.
A box of clean, folded linen, a handmade
quilt, once, old with value, a barely worn
pair of jack-boots, set aside for such pickers …a
stadium coat (Sam’s?), a box of black carbon steel
kitchen knives, badly in need of addressal. Stuff
to save from cremation or burial.
The whole toxic dump has been buried,
never to be exhumed after a generation
of research, local corruption and shame
over 13 acres 32 feet deep, spread with layers
of sand and gravel, innocent topsoil and grass.
It looks like a golf course with steep hills.
Odorless methane seeps up from primal
decomposition, warm organic layers
breathing through a hundred yellow, PVC,
candy cane pipes, where the intimate past
was no altered reality, or assisted living,
still cooking in odd venerable minds that do
know grief, and dream of something to poke,
bend for, wipe off, get a good look at, better
than the next guy’s loot, free and maybe
beautiful, an old plate trophy, Class B High
School State Champion in the 440, 1927.
They knew him, dead for years, the best welder
in Maine, maybe the world, half Passamaquoddy
who welded something from blueprint
at Boston Naval Shipyard, a mysterious piece
of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He learned
about it from a speech, delivered by a grateful
Senator to the second shift, just after the war.
He moved out of his shop to a house a mile
from where our old pickers still hung out in hope
while the new black and white hills piled up,
nothing telling, no history, no decent chance
for patient study, where the academic realm
of the gaffer was busy when we were young,
stuff chosen carefully, stored in one bulb sheds,
on oiled benches with worn tools, a cranky vise
that works for ordinary reasons, the rest of civilization
sinking, shallow, above time, but below consideration,
bulldozed over with gravel and dirt that lets methane
rise through mowed grass, while the gaffers stand about,
mull and maunder the Town’s gate and Master Lock,
knowing grief’s not gas, nor plastic closure.
____________
Paul Nelson
Review by Dave Mehler
Starting out with a catalog of characters doing their jobs, like the crew of the Pequod rendering whale blubber, and then a list of stuff, the offal of the world, with such a sure command of language we are introduced to the dump and continue to wind on down through the lines, without any misstep in awfulness. It’s almost a religious experience in the name of cleanliness, on the hunt to find some holiness in a landfill. Somebodies gotta do it. Who better than gaffers accompanied by angelic gulls, who keep a watch, on the lookout for something useful to redeem, something headed for the fire or premature burial–gaffers or geezers showing up simply to shoot the shit, enjoy some local entertainment? The lists are marvelous, Paul. You are providing me with an homage to Bad Is Bent Good, and I am magnificently outshone. Thanks for this!! [G]rief’s not gas nor plastic closure. Amen.