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.
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