Sandee Gertz Umbach

USA

Love Story for a Steel Town

Johnstown, I want to be your Eugene Smith,
shoot graflex still shots
of men’s hardened hands,
blue veins around steel.

I want to capture pattern makers from the 1950’s
when they sized molds in shirts and ties,
figuring their algebraic sums in Moxham’s Bar & Wire,

pencil in ear, my father and his father lifting
their prints to the shop light, exacting
measurements of what steel will cast and harden,

Not everyone can be a pattern maker,
old men on porches tell me
You have to see things no one else sees.

Like petunias blooming stark through concrete
up against tumble down houses, shapes
where there are only flat lines.

Driving his Buick over Broad Avenue to the mill gate I know my father saw himself
instead taking off for Route 30 West --

climbing the steep summit, setting up
brushes and canvass, where, for years,
he said he’d always wanted to paint the sunrise.

What did he envision beyond the craggy tops
of mountains that rimmed our valley city,
seducing thousands of us to forget there was an open sky,

a city where German Lutheran men pace silent rooms and dream of the deep Black Forest
their unopened tubes of burnt sienna.

Today when I drive the gray streets, small, bent-over women mop porches on calloused knees.
Smith would take a picture of their wrinkling housedresses,

But I would capture the mill men posed on patios
gazing out to the Alleghenies, the patterns
of each hill, folding and unfolding their hands.

Some Girls Have Auras of Bright Colors

but mine were silver stars on walls,
tears when I sat at mother’s bay window

and sometimes that odd feeling of time over
a never-ending space,

where I followed a dark hole,
layer through layer, opening

to a time before me, God,
and a time before that

until the emptiness settled
into stones in the pit of my stomach

and I had to touch anything;
a polished shoe, a porcelain cup,

to be sure I was in this world
before it shifted and fell.

Is this what Dostoyevsky felt before seizures,
his glimpse of awe and understanding?

For years, this trance descended
while I sat drinking Mountain Dew on the couch,

drawn to the window view of David Street below,
older girls in games of rope jumped

on the cracked sidewalk while I wrapped
myself in the exquisite sadness.

Conjuring up eternity and blackness,
I was moved to sing; the gifts of a scarred brain --

the drama I couldn’t name, but
medical texts say was just my aura;

that even spaces between
seizures were suspect and traceable,

patterns random and fleeting
I thought I owned, like those stars,

ever sizzling as they fell
about the room, settling

into dustless corners;
still light, still shimmering.

Stationary Front
On the night of June 22, 1977 an intense storm cell became stationary between two ridges over Johnstown, Pennsylvania


For years we watched the rain swell
our tiny creek of Dale Borough. An unnamed tributary buried beneath Berkebile Hill, running along the narrow alley, its edges the worn river rock we tossed into fresh water,

until that summer evening when the sky opened up
and broke the cobalt over our makeshift playground, six of us looking up from a cape of Marlboro’s and sticks, barely nodding toward the yellow/green filter of the sun.

How could we embrace the fact that night it would rain 18 inches of sky to ground, the wild air mass swirling and stuck between Chestnut Ridge and the rim of the Alleghenies, the night-shift bell at the mill, drowned out by its thunder and moaning,

the storm unable to escape the pull of valley air;
like all of us unable to lift up and fly over those ridges though thousands of us drove Chevy Lasers down Rt. 56 to D.C., Maryland, Virginia Beach, thinking we’d left it behind,

the shelter of green hills, the stories of our fathers’ lucky chances, the uncertain lilt at the end of statements that sound like questions
we never quite answered, in silence when friends returned, when they packed bags for a distant place but still showed up at the diner,

caught in the deep crevice of those mountains, remote and walled off yet the storms kept finding us, like that night when the water journeyed down
down our street, stealthy, and swallowing up the creek, taking it on a death run through town, through tiny bodies and burning basements

rebuilt now with massive concrete – dam capacity-- to rule out the possibility of future floods, numbered #1264 by a Corp of Army engineers
the water, where decades ago we stirred the sprays of tadpoles with sticks
devoid of life, and running blood red.

© All Copyright, Sandra Gertz Umbach.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.