A Factory

I.

She is dying or might be dying. In any case, she accelerates.

I feel it may be polite to state this first

so that the information does not arrive unexpectedly or rudely,

like an April frost on citrus trees

or an anorexic daughter divorcing insanity at the age of nineteen.

The factory where I work was recently moved, to be made larger, but my work

remains the same. It is a very curious place, you see, because

it is expected that only one in a hundred fabrications will be successful

(the rejects, our failures, are discarded and it is forbidden to speak of them).

The ceilings are taller than before. The walls are longer and wider.

I am unsure if the paint is different.

Through various doors (made in factories operated by others, of course)

I have seen several hundred persons enter this part of my life.

Some I have been very fond of and some were so very pretty

they made my goddamn teeth hurt and most of them

I couldn't remember if I were offered a thousand dollars

for the color of their hair.

II.

She had been absent for a few weeks and one day her bad luck was announced over a microphone (delicately, as if news of cancer was an orchid in need of watering).

The nature of our work is not particularly important. We repeat tasks thousands of times and make enough money to live. The owner of the company is tremendously wealthy. He is probably deeply unpleasant to people who enjoy larger salaries than I am allotted. He has been polite to me in our few interactions, as far as memory allows, but then, who would insult the busboy?

Death is so frequently arbitrary when it is not mine- some dog without a collar running fatally through the yard of my childhood home, the steam coming off the entrails of a clumsily-gutted doe. Even now, if on the radio or television a professional with a cultivated MidWestern accent intones the word "dead", I am forced to suppress the reflex to search for boots and a shovel. It didn't occur to me until I was nine that one day I would exhaust the masters; that immense sections of the Library were a graveyard. With every examined word I butchered the man that wrote it and I licked the knives after.

Nearly every week I expect to lose the job. I've never been fired before. When my grandmother was dying I didn't go see her even though she was in the hospital just down the interstate from where I lived then. Some three months or so after she died, I didn't want to be in my intermediate French course any longer on that day so I told the professor that my grandmother was dying and I went to my apartment and drank eight beers and went to sleep. Will I always be an owl whose barn has been burned down?

An Exile

Julia, starving in your lonely room,

I flout the pain of death to visit you.

I know your other names, your small secrets,

But worry not- I bring to you freedom.

Your bed and wit have been made desolate,

Proving that men can be crueler than gods-

To torture you before your life had fled!

The situation's changed, now imprisoned

When once you locked doors at my advances:

I wonder if I can trust your honeyed words,

Coy eyelashes, or your mouth on my neck

As you sit stoic in a mourner's clothes.

Then suddenly I realize the mistake

That, if discovered, brings to me the headsman's axe.

Goddess, with your eyes as grey as wisdom,

Have I offended you long in the past

That you did not warn of this disaster?

Julia, a heap of black-dyed linen!

Even in folded robes, there are no bones!

Oh no, oh no, my love, my foolish love,

In vain I have journeyed across the sea,

A sea as dark as cloth you do not bear

Upon thin shoulders. Am I now too late?

Oh, laughable question, the assassins

Have taken blades held between their white teeth

And they will pierce me, drain breath to the floor.

A kiss, then, to my memory, quiet the blow.

Let me believe that you were always Julia.