Dedication: Campaign

•

They were called 'colonizers.'
For some, it was the first time
they worked with their hands.
Their fingers bled

on the bandsaw, blades looping loose

as they fed sheetmetal too fast.
They pulled their backs lifting

boxes. Forklifts stalled and fat
packages of pus swelled under
press burns. They reddened when

dressed down by the foreman,
fists shrinking up their shirt-sleeves

and some of them walked off, back
to Princeton or Brown, back
to music and houseguests
back to a boxcar or pallet in an alleyway. Some kept working.

By the second crew

they knew the speedup, the bevel angle
on a lathe, the right mix of salt, nitric and hydrochloric
acid to polish brass, how to

hustle and jerk, why the lines in a man's

face deepen rather than, like a falling wall,
grow longer: nothing changes, only more so.
And some of them were sent out into the darkness

of Ohio, Tennessee, landscapes filling
with shadow, where they vanished into
a motel sign, a parking lot, plastic in a canyon
of sand, trailers parked around road bends,

in which sleep is less rest and more like
an engine ticking until it finally goes silent,
and some died there.

And they talked. Sold copies of the Daily Worker.
Held meetings. Lead strikes, if there were strikes,
formed unions, if there were unions to form.
Or wandered, isolate amongst a people

with whom they could never communicate,
whose silence is a language they couldn't learn.

Or maybe they spoke, explained how

a pair of gloves could keep fingernails
from peeling off in the brass polish,
how Jenkins, cut Adam's apple to testicles
saved the company 3 dollars for a railguard on the walk

how the mangle of scar tissue on hands
fattens hands invisible as the ancient pharaohs.

Or simply, said what could be done about it.

And some wondered how a kid
who knew work secondhand,
like something borrowed, a spare coat

could explain the meaning of work

a man who knew nothing of their lives or value
could make them believe in their own life and its value

lives change partner, the world changes
we make it change.