Behind Every Blue-Collar Day

Monday, May 12th, 2014

Here is the weary weary,
toothache end of the day,
where the boulders you have moved
lie in the riverbed of your room,
unimpressed with your exhaustion,
unimpressed with your dignity. Here’s what you tell me:
the wind is swift, the hotel bed is like the cross,
there are no potatoes, no green vegetables,
much less warm skin, much less soft breath,
only the bleak prose of the bills and the asymphonic notes
of the trucks idling all night outside the nailed window.

There is no anonymous workerwoman, everyman.
Behind every blue-collar day
are the thousand love poems he’d like to write, a fire dance
they secretly long to do, a hundred sculptures
she would put in a garden, maybe the Rose Garden,
maybe anonymously, maybe statues of illegal Mexican gardeners,
the ones who are paid less, maybe statues of Russian gardeners,
the ones who have no health care, spraying the elegant roses with FDA-approved toxins,
maybe sculptures of young house cleaners, exhausted, asleep with their canisters of comet
under the Queen Elizabeth variety.

If I could, I would grant the garbage collectors their trip to the moon;
the straight line painters a month of curves
the construction workers that long day in the sun
to build the best sand castles, and then wreck them, and then build them again,
and then move in if they want, and not on their anemic day off.

How lucky, someone told me, that company is moving the Widget factory
back to Oregon, back from Malaysia.
Work for the fortunate poor in that once crucified town.
Now the Malaysians can starve some more, a skill they have honed —
and the Oregonians have the great luck to stand in the click click
of the factory, and make their lives into tiny plastic meaning.
Anne Weiss – October 13, 2009

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Festivals

Sunday, September 29th, 2013

At festivals, after midday,
though bagpipes and fiddles
spin a dervish through the air,
and though there is much clapping
and singing, the drug of sun
has made some drunk and drowsy.
I look at the sweet faces
of the surprisingly asleep,
and though there is much clapping
and singing, and dancing,
the sleepers hear only the soundtrack
of their dreams.

This one woman, no longer a girl,
one hand thrown above her head,
flowered dress slightly turned
brown hair falling up off her forehead,
her face as calm as clover.
As though no harm has ever come,
nor ever will, nor was ever
thought of,
and I think the hardest criminal
must look like this asleep –
all wrongs transposed to innocence
by the inner notes of mercy.

Vancouver Folk Festival 14 July 2001

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A Manifesto On Beautiful

Sunday, September 29th, 2013

It occurs to me that everyone is beautiful,
these weight lifters
with their oversized arms,
these dancers with their self conscious legs,
the big woman at the treadmill, who is afraid she is not beautiful,
as afraid as the dancers that they are not beautiful,
as afraid as the weight lifters
that they are not beautiful. I see them
in the mirrors, passing by,
holding their thighs in, holding
their chests out,
holding magazines that say Elle and Him
and Fit and Self and Gaitor Aid.

But in the nodding mornings, when their lovers toss
the smooth covers away, they each in their disarray
shine like perfect gems.
And their lovers- soft, modest,
old, young, fit, fat, gregarious, bony,
sensual, slovenly, neat, their lovers
can only think of how exactly right
each line, each curve, each arc of bone or muscle,
each pulse swimming in each vein,
each sigh, each mumbled dream, how it is all
exactly what they wanted. Each lover
turns toward the workday so full of longing,
so drawn back the tousled bed where they can still reach
to the epicenter of the beautiful, of what they love,
the imperfect holy, of all of us.

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