I remember a photo of Uncle Bill
beside a turbine. He said he had
a wide smile on. I couldn’t see it
for the massive turbine
housing, shaft and collar.
He was so proud: as though he’d made it
in his backyard and discovered America again.
He showed me how he’d held the rivet gun
for seven thousand hours, four hundred
fifty-nine, he said, count ’em,
putting his hands to mine and blasting away.
It was music to us then.
I mean it was huge, he said,
as if wanting to explain again
the unexplainablle. Be he never
could. How could he when all
he had to show for it
was the photo of the turbine
and his head a pin beside it?
It was how he saw America then:
big, strapping, raw, impossible
dreams dreamed and done, harnessing
rivers and long dead dinosaurs.
They’d wrestled all the big ones,
he said, and won, leaving us
nothing to do but sit back
and relax.
And they’d gone to Paradise
for whiskey, he said, California,
and had barely escaped with his life
when the scaffolding fell,
thanks to a piss call, there
in the pines, they’d built the dams
and breathed them with enormous lungs,
and placed the turbines, slept ten to a room,
didn’t save much money from the cards
for the children they all loved to talk of,
washed in the cold river, went home
and left again.
And the high, white whine of the turbine
when it began to spin, a sound
he said, so strange no one could forget
its promise and despair,
coming from a world that no one knew
though they had built it, a world
of revolutions in the thousands
every second, of speed, of mass, of metal,
vanes and rivets, gears, grease, millions
of miles of wire, bearings, ball joints
aligned in micro-millimeters.
He would pause then, to let me feel
the weight of it: and
power pouring out the other end,
whole cities lit and that high
white blue white scream, to rend
your soul, he said, the very heart of metal
straining, surging, aching, drawing
life itself from out the earth
and giving it on to valley folk,
farmers, tradesmen, shoolboys, women
working, lighting up their lives and
mulitplying time and
That high skywhite scream
of someone you knew, falling
and nothing you can do, and
it never ending, until
it’s part of you and you
would be less without it,
high on the mountain,
high over the pines, the falling
river. It didn’t snow for years,
he said, afraid of that
phantasmal screaming,
but it kept his heart beating,
hard.
Can’t you hear it! he would say,
leaping from his chair,
grasping my head with his
riveter’s hands and holding it
to his riveter’s stare, and
my hands on his wrist in fear
we hung in the whistle of breathing
and turbines in despair.
He heard it everywhere,
in every turning piece of steel,
in every locomotive, power plant,
Pacific ship, the wailing cry of turbines
of promise and despair.
And he went crazy, mother said,
hearing them and looking at Manhattan.
And come to this! he said
when I last saw him,
cutting from the photo his pin-head face.
Black dinosaur gold
drawn from the earth, shot
through the veins of the century:
every city sang with the brilliance
of their animal anguish
and warmth of their passing.
Come to this! their keening sorrow,
not just another wake, but the last one,
the last dinosaur’s death, turning turbines
he had helped to build, the sinews of a country
he couldn’t help but love.
And come to this! He sprang with shorting wire
to the wall and sparks flashed out, and
smoke and wild yells, he bolted,
mother screaming. Come to this!
The hope was there, of paradise and
Come to this! He sliced the motor hoses,
sugared up the gas tanks, and
Come to this! with fecaled hand he wrote
Danger down on elevator walls, and fled,
his breathing labored, to the hills,
packing dynamite, following the
stars he knew and pines, stopping
and cocking his head to hear
the sad high whine
of turbines in despair.
Will Kirkland,
October, 1979
Appeared in The American Poetry Review
November/December 1979, Vol 8. No 6