The Mill-Race

Four-fifty. The palings of Trinity Church

Burying Ground, a few inches above the earth,

are sunk in green light. The low stones

like pale books knocked sideways. The bus so close to the curb

that brush-drops of ebony paint stand out wetly, the sunlight

seethes with vibrations, the sidewalks

on Whitehall shudder with subterranean tremors. Overhead, faint flickers

crackle down the window-paths: limpid telegraphy of the

late afternoon July thunderstorm unfurling over Manhattan.

Its set and luminous velocity, long stalks of stormlight, and then the first drops

strike their light civic stripes on the pavement.

Between the palings, oat-panicles sift a few bright

grains to the stonecourse. Above it, at shoulder height

a side door is flung open, fire-exits; streaming from lobbies

come girls and women, white girls in shadowy-striped rayon skirts, plastic ear-hoops,

black girls in gauzy-toned nylons, ripples of cornrows and plaits,

one girl with shocked-back ash hair, lightened eyebrows;

one face from Easter Island, mauve and granitic;

thigh on thigh, waist by waist; the elbow’s curlicue and the fingers’; elbow-work, heel-work,

are suddenly absorbed in the corduroyed black rubber stairs of the bus. Humid

sighs, settlings, each face tilts up to the windows’

shadowless yards of mercuric green plate glass. An

interspace then, like the slowing of some rural

water-mill, a creaking and dipping pause

of black-splintered paddles, the irregularly

dappled off-lighting—bottle-green—the lucid slim sluice

falling back in a stream from the plank edge. It won’t take us

altogether, we say, the mill-race—it won’t churn us up altogether. We’ll keep

a glib stretch of leisure water, like our self’s self—to reflect the sky.

But we won’t (says the bus rider now to herself). Nothing’s

left over, really, from labor. They’ve taken it all for the mill-race.

In close-ups now, you can see it in every face,

despite the roped rain light pouring down the bus-windows—

it’s the strain of gravity itself, of life hours cut off and offered

to the voice that says “Give me this day your

life, that is LABOR, and I’ll give you back

one day, then another. For mine are the terms.”

It’s gravity, spilling in capillaries, cheek-tissue trembling,

despite the make-up, the monograms, the mass-market designer scarves,

the army of signs disowning the workplace and longing for night ...

But even as the rain slackens, labor

lengthens itself along Broadway. The night signs

come on, that wit has set up to draw money: O’DONNELL’S,

BEIRUT CAFE, YONAH’S KNISH ... People dart out from awnings.

The old man at the kiosk starts his late shift, whipping off rainstreaked

lucite sheets from his stacks of late-market newsprint.

If there is leisure, bus-riders, it’s not for you,

not between here and uptown or here and the Bronx.

Outside Marine Midland, the black sea of unmarked corporate hire-cars

waits for the belated office lights, the long rainy run to the exurbs;

and perhaps on a converted barn roof in Connecticut

leisure may silver the shingles, somewhere the densely packed

labor-mines that run a half mile down from the sky

to the Battery rise, metamorphic, in water-gardens,

lichened windows where the lamp lights Thucydides or Gibbon.

It’s not a water-mill really, labor. It’s like the nocturnal

paper-mill pulverizing, crushing each fiber of rag into atoms,

or the workhouse tread-mill, smooth-lipped, that wore down a London of doxies and sharps,

or the flour-mill, faërique, that raised the cathedrals and wore out hosts of dust-demons,

but it’s mostly the miller’s curse-gift, forgotten of God yet still grinding, the salt-

mill, that makes the sea, salt.

Source: The Displaced of Capital (2004)