Peter Blair has a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Iowa. He has worked in a steel mill, a psychiatric ward, and served three years in the Peace Corps in Thailand. He has published three chapbooks, INSIDE THE TRACKHOE, A ROUND, FAIR DISTANCE FROM THE FURNACE, and FURNACE GREENS all of which won national contests. His first full-length collection, LAST HEAT, won the 1999 Washington Prize and is forthcoming in February from Word Works Press. About his work, Alicia Ostriker has written:
"Peter Blair's poetry takes me right inside a place I've never been, the working life of a steel mill. God is in the details, and they are good and strong here."
His poems have appeared in CRAZYHORSE, RIVER CITY, POETRY EAST, and WEST BRANCH. He has received two Pennsylvania Council On the Arts Grants for poetry. Currently he is an adjunct professor of English at Georgetown University, and he lives with his wife and son in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Shipping Floor
Tonight Heckman snores in a trench
between two stacks of steel slabs
bound for a dump truck factory in Michigan.
His head lies in the bowl of his hard hat,
cushion-bands hugging his temples.
His belly rises and falls on the cement,
alien as moss on a rock. Even in summer
the air here is cool as a morgue,
conditioned by the plates of steel,
a thousand times harder than shin bones.
We grow used to the dead "clack" of chains
dropped onto them by cranes, breaking
the silence of the graveyard shift.
Heckman's half-drunk. We should be sweeping up
in the lull before the train comes
to haul the slabs away. But I'm his partner
and he's told me to watch for rats,
and the supervisor we call Vanilla Angel,
for his white hard hat and gray hair.
Vanilla makes his night rounds: the stainless
coil shop, the bar and bloom yard
and the shipping floor. On nights when he comes,
his legs hidden by the steel stacks,
he glides toward us from the other side
of the floor. He's written Heckman up twice,
suspended him once. I imagine hooking up a load, Heckman
asleep on the top slab. We'd lower him
into a rail car and he'd wake up halfway
across the country. Blue sky and forests
would careen past him, a free wind blowing
through his hair. A dark shadow skitters
between the slabs. I toss a wooden block,
and a fast whip-tail vanishes toward the river.
The light is clear as gin; the steel, gray as ice
filled with air. Heckman draws deep breaths.
I'm staying awake, staying awake.
Fatality, Open Hearth 5
The charred man lies on the stretcher,
a burned caption to the white idea
of the infirmary room. He's on the floor
by the bed, and the room claims him now
like the words, "USS Homestead Works,"
sewn into the pillowcase. His blistered forearms
square off in rigor mortis against the fire
that scorched his blood-darkened face,
that tore his asbestos furnace coat
and melted the soles of his shoes.
The burned man's destroyed flesh
lies in the clean white room
to be photographed for insurance
and safety reasons, and tucked into files.
Maybe the ladle splashed the hot steel
when the crane moved, or they broke spout
too soon and the errant, red-hot bath
caught him just as he turned
for the last time to eye-melting heat.
The soot-covered man has made it
to this little heaven, the one room free
of dust and grease, smoke and ashes.
No need to put him on the tightly tucked bed
wrapped in white with perfect hospital corners
and the grid of raised stitches
like a blueprint of the mill. He's gone,
though his stiff hand still creates,
in the flash of the camera, a shadow-face of grief
on the clean backdrop of the sheet.
The dead man can't stay in the spotless room,
built to reassure the union, the workers,
the wives. Its wall-tiles surround him,
rectangles, neat as rail cars in the mill yard.
The stretcher's on wheels. Soon
he'll be shipped out of this narrow room
where the bed lies shrouded in white,
held up by rails of stainless steel.
The Night We Pitch It
Until the TV sails through wet, black air,
the bowling balls at the Strand
seem heavy, the linoleum floor in the cage
elevator shaved too thin. Until the TV sails
into the valley of railroad tracks, silent
as a fuse, our flat Iron City drafts
at Lasek's Bar bore into our stomachs
and stew. A steel worker, two roofers, a printer,
our jobs seem dead ends of our youth
that Sunday night in May when Agnole
says at the light, "I got a busted black and white
in the trunk to get rid of." The answer
surfaces, inevitable as hills, "Throw it
off the bridge." Until the TV booms into the empty
coal car, a shower of sparks and glass,
and we hoot and high-five, speeding off in the car
like crack high school commandos,
we aren't sure whose side time is on,
playing tackle in the mud, buttoning our nights
with Space Invaders at the Luna,
considering marriage. But there it is, that sound
filling up the deep beneath us,
and Jim shouting in the car above the rest,
"By tomorrow it'll be in Chicago."
"Company" John
Years later I see him, my old foreman,
now a guard, slouched in the lobby
of Duquesne's College Hall. Students
stream in and out of elevators.
I walk by without speaking, my head bowed.
"You don't tell me what to do. I
tell you!" he used to roar, storming
through the control room. Needles of pressure
gauges quivered above his smudged white
hard hat. At 11:15 at night he ordered
the third cast that shift, watched
a spinning bore drill into the belly
of the furnace. The third explosion
shook the dirty glass when the iron
first flowed, and he told me to shove
the black, clay cubes into the plunger gun
that plugged the hole. If we tapped before 5,
we tapped twice more before midnight; if not
it was hell in the cast house, an nobody
went near him if anything broke down. We joked
about the time he came out of the john
holding up his unzipped pants, shouting
and pointing to the first helper "to shit
or get off the pot." He lost his job,
same as the workers when they closed Carrie
and poured water into the furnaces;
the final loads of iron cooled, untapped.
Last Heat
"I was here," says "Pork Chop" Nickelson,
the steel pourer at Open Hearth 5, "when 2, 3
and 4 went down." Drawing a long iron spoon
from the furnace notch, he pours out ten puddles
of liquid light into the dust. The steel curdles
and cools into slate-gray pucks, souvenirs
for the few old timers who've gathered
with cameras. One man's brought his teenage sons
to see the glow fade forever in the dark shed.
It's 1:44 p.m. Crane wheels rumble in high darkness
like a planet turning on its obscure axis.
A huge steel bucket hangs from chains.
Fast, faster, the cast-whistle hurries after itself
as a torrent of molten steel rushes from the spout
into the ladle. "Taps" echoes over the loudspeaker.
Soon they break spout and the full ladle,
shooting orange streaks of sputtering steel,
moves away to fill the ingot molds.
Someone whistles, "Glory Hallelujah" as glowing slag
leaks from the furnace and cools on the dirt floor
like a dead river. The melter foreman
calls the last heat into the strange silence
of 11 empty furnaces: "0,3,5 sulfur,
18 carbide, 17 manganese, copper oxide."
The first four poems were published in my chapbooks, the
last one is unpublished as yet.
© Copyright, Peter Blair.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.