A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.
She looks down at the cabbage on her plate,
She stares at the broken bread. Proposition:
The irreducible slavery of workers. "To work
In order to eat, to eat in order to work."
She thinks of the punchclock in her chest,
Of night deepening in the bindweed and crabgrass,
In the vapors and atoms, in the factory
Where a steel vise presses against her temples
Ten hours per day. She doesn't eat.
She doesn't sleep. Shealmost doesn't think
Now that she has brushed against the bruised
Arm of oblivion and tasted the blood, now
That the furnace has labelled her skin
And branded her forehead like a Roman slave's.
Surely God comes to the clumsy and inefficient,
To welders in dark spectacles, and unskilled
Workers who spend their allotment of days
Pulling red-hot metal bobbinsfrom the flames.
Surely God appears to the shattered and anonymous,
To the humiliated and afflicted
Whose legs are married to perpetual motion
And whose hands are too small for their bodies.
Proposition: "Through work man turns himself
Into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.
Work is like a death. We have to pass
Through death. We have to be killed."
We have to wake in order to work, to labor
And count, to fail repeatedly, to submit
To the furious rhythm of machines, to suffer
The pandemonium and inhabit the repetitions,
To become the sacrificial beast: time entering
Into the body, the body entering into time.
She presses her forehead against the table:
To work in order to eat, to eat . . .
Outside, the moths are flaring into stars
And stars are strung like beads across the heavens.
Inside, a glass of red wine trembles
Next to the cold cabbage and broken bread.
Exhausted night, she is the brimming liquid
And untouched food. Come down to her.
:: Edward Hirsch, Earthly Measures (Knopf, 1994)
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