america adrift

Bastille Day in America

Swung toward work enclosures today as I ironed my linen shirt, a shirt one

doesn’t wear to work, say, leather factory with its massive dyeing wheels & dryer

belts, or soon enough fish with its saws could cut a man’s arm up to here; then

meat, where the difference in temperature between what lands in & rises out of

the plastic vats for dogs & sausages & that of the freezer is the vast difference

between poor & rich, between alienated & privileged. There are worse things

than working in any of these factories, or the textile one I labored at before six in

the morning in front of sewing machines counting production & stitching hours

at fifty-seven-years old, where others were older. Like not having a job, fending

for oneself on the streets of any rough & tumble street in America. I don’t

begrudge those jobs, in fact thankful today to have them unconsciously rise up in

juxtaposition, adding to the immense sense of Freedom I feel inside this shirt,

breathing this air where I can come & go as I please, where I can gaze at trees,

comparing that Freedom with the first five-minute break we got after an hour & a

half of drudgery under the mechanical eyes of sewing machines, five-minutes of

regimented exercise, that is, calisthenics to keep young & old limber enough to

work another hour & a half before release for a cup of coffee. I’d always sidle up

next to the lone window in the place, where the equally lone tree stood outside.

It’s happening right now up in Freeport, Maine!

~

Freedom for me has always entailed either a sense of travel, or a sense of

reading, or even better, traveling & reading. So that when encumbered from

doing so under the dyeing wheels, trying to separate the heavy, wet animal skins

from each other I joined my mentors & colleagues to dream of the pink-green

weather of home in Puerto Rico, or with hands just shy of the band saw & a

block of frozen fish winding along the small towns of the Italian Riviera similar

to Pavilion beach we couldn’t see right outside the white building, or even

imagined dusty Grecian roads toward Delphi along with my displaced coworkers

deep inside the city like a cow’s entrails.

~

Maybe, because it’s Bastille Day here in America, & somehow the French-

Canadian side of my family swirled past & through me today, like the pride I felt

early on knowing my great-grandmother spoke only French, a language left only

as a silent remnant in the beautiful physiognomies of the women in the family.