‘Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam
‘May I express thee unblamed?’”
And still go down.
Now ladder-mouth; and the precipitous fear,
uncertain rungs down into after-night.
“This is the place. Away from this my life
I am indeed Adam unparadiz'd.
Some fools call this the Black Hole of Calcutta,
I don't know how they ever get to Congress.”
Gulfs, spirals, that the drunken ladder swings,
its rungs give, pliant, beneath the leaping heart.
Leaps twice at midnight. But a naked bulb
makes glare, turns paler, burns to dark again.
Brilliance begins, stutters. And comes upon
after the tall abstract, the ill, the unmasked men,
the independent figure of the welder
masked for his work; acts with unbearable flame.
His face is a cage of steel, the hands are covered,
points dazzle hot, fly from his writing torch,
brighten the face and hands marrying steel.
Says little, works : only : A little down,
five men were killed in the widening of the tunnel.”
Shell of bent metal; walking along an arc
the tube rounds up about your shoulders, black
circle, great circle, down infinite mountains rides,
echoes words, footsteps, testimonies.
“One said the air was thin, Fifth-Avenue clean.”
The iron pillars mark a valve division,
four tunnels merging. Iron on iron resounds,
echoes along created gorges. “Sing,
test echoes, sing : Pilgrim,” he cries,
singing Once More, Dear Home,
as all the light burns out.
Down the reverberate channels of the hills
the suns declare midnight, go down, cannot ascend,
no ladder back; see this, your eyes can ride through steel,
this is the river Death, diversion of power,
the root of the tower and the tunnel's core,
this is the end.
THE DAM
All power is saved, having no end. Rises
in the green season, in the sudden season
the white the budded
and the lost.
Water celebrates, yielding continually
sheeted and fast in its overfall
slips down the rock, evades the pillars
building its colonnades, repairs
in stream and standing wave
retains its seaward green
broken by obstacle rock; falling, the water sheet
spouts, and the mind dances, excess of white.
White brilliant function of the land's disease.
Many-spanned, lighted, the crest leans under
concrete arches and the channelled hills,
turns in the gorge toward its release;
kinetic and controlled, the sluice
urging the hollow, the thunder,
the major climax
energy
total and open watercourse
praising the spillway, fiery glaze,
crackle of light, cleanest velocity
flooding, the moulded force.
I open out a way over the water
I form a path between the Combatants:
Grant that I sail down like a living bird,
power over the fields and Pool of Fire.
Phoenix, I sail over the phoenix world.
Diverted water, the fern and fuming white
ascend in mist of continuous diffusion.
Rivers are turning inside their mountains,
streams line the stone, rest at the overflow
lake and in lanes of pliant color lie.
Blessing of this innumerable silver,
printed in silver, images of stone
walk on a screen of falling water
in film-silver in continual change
recurring colored, plunging with the wave.
Constellations of light, abundance of many rivers.
The sheeted island-cities, the white surf filling west,
the hope, fast water spilled where still pools fed.
Great power flying deep: between the rock and the sunset,
the caretaker's house and the steep abutment,
hypnotic water fallen and the tunnels under
the moist and fragile galleries of stone,
mile-long, under the wave. Whether snow fall,
the quick light fall, years of white cities fall,
flood that this valley built falls slipping down
the green turn in the river's green.
Steep gorge, the wedge of crystal in the sky.
How many feet of whirlpools?
What is a year in terms of falling water?
Cylinders; kilowatts; capacities.
Continuity: Σ Q = 0
Equations for falling water. The streaming motion.
The balance-sheet of energy that flows
passing along its infinite barrier.
It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide,
runs through electric wires;
it comes, warning the night,
running among these rigid hills,
a single force to waken our eyes.
They poured the concrete and the columns stood,
laid bare the bedrock, set the cells of steel,
a dam for monument was what they hammered home.
Blasted, and stocks went up;
insured the base,
and limousines
wrote their own graphs upon
roadbed and lifeline.
Their hands touched mastery:
wait for defense, solid across the world.
Mr. Griswold. “A corporation is a body without a soul.”
Mr. Dunn. When they were caught at it they resorted to the
methods employed by gunmen, ordinary machine-gun
racketeers. They cowardly tried to buy out the people who had
the information on them.
Mr. Marcantonio. I agree that a racket has been practised, but the
most damnable racketeering that I have ever known is the
paying of a fee to the very attorney who represented these
victims. That is the most outrageous racket that has ever come
within my knowledge.
Miss Allen. Mr. Jesse J. Ricks, the president of the Union Carbide
& Carbon Corporation, suggested that the stock-holder had better
take this question up in a private conference.
The dam is safe. A scene of power.
The dam is the father of the tunnel.
This is the valley's work, the white, the shining.
The dam is used when the tunnel is used.
The men and the water are never idle,
have definitions.
This is a perfect fluid, having no age nor hours,
surviving scarless, unaltered, loving rest,
willing to run forever to find its peace
in equal seas in currents of still glass.
Effects of friction : to fight and pass again,
learning its power, conquering boundaries,
able to rise blind in revolts of tide,
broken and sacrificed to flow resumed.
Collecting eternally power. Spender of power,
torn, never can be killed, speeded in filaments,
million, its power can rest and rise forever,
wait and be flexible. Be born again.
Nothing is lost, even among the wars,
imperfect flow, confusion of force.
It will rise. These are the phases of its face.
It knows its seasons, the waiting, the sudden.
It changes. It does not die.
THE DISEASE: AFTER-EFFECTS
This is the life of a Congressman.
Now
he is standing on the floor of the House,
the galleries full; raises his voice; presents the bill.
Legislative, the fanfare, greeting its heroes with
ringing of telephone bells preceding entrances,
snapshots (Grenz rays, recording structure) newsreels.
This is silent, and he proposes:
embargo on munitions
to Germany and Italy
as states at war with Spain.
He proposes
Congress memorialize
the governor of California : free Tom Mooney.
A bill for a TVA at Fort Peck Dam.
A bill to prevent industrial silicosis.
This is the gentleman from Montana.
—I'm a child, I'm leaning from a bedroom window,
clipping the rose that climbs upon the wall,
the tea roses, and the red roses,
one for a wound, another for disease,
remembrance for strikers. I was five, going on six,
my father on strike at the Anaconda mine;
they broke the Socialist mayor we had in Butte,
the sheriff (friendly), found their judge. Strike-broke.
Shot father. He died : wounds and his disease.
My father had silicosis.
Copper contains it, we find it in limestone,
sand quarries, sandstone, potteries, foundries,
granite, abrasives, blasting; many kinds of grinding,
plate, mining, and glass.
Widespread in trade, widespread in space!
Butte, Montana; Joplin, Missouri; the New York tunnels,
the Catskill Aqueduct. In over thirty States.
A disease worse than consumption.
Only eleven States have laws.
There are today one million potential victims.
500,000 Americans have silicosis now.
These are the proportions of a war.
Pictures rise, foreign parades, the living faces,
Asturian miners with my father's face,
wounded and fighting, the men at Gauley Bridge,
my father's face enlarged; since now our house
and all our meaning lies in this
signature: power on a hill
centered in its committee and its armies
sources of anger, the mine of emphasis.
No plane can ever lift us high enough
to see forgetful countries underneath,
but always now the map and X-ray seem
resemblent pictures of one living breath
one country marked by error
and one air.
It sets up a gradual scar formation;
this increases, blocking all drainage from the lung,
eventually scars, blocking the blood supply,
and then they block the air passageways.
Shortness of breath,
pains around the chest,
he notices lack of vigor.
Bill blocked; investigation blocked.
These galleries produce their generations.
The Congressmen are restless, stare at the triple tier,
the flags, the ranks, the walnut foliage wall;
a row of empty seats, mask over a dead voice.
But over the country, a million look from work,
five hundred thousand stand.
THE BILL
The subcommittee submits:
Your committee held hearings, heard many witnesses; finds:
THAT the Hawk's Nest tunnel was constructed
Dennis and Rinehart, Charlottesville, Va., for
New Kanawha Power Co., subsidiary of
Union Carbide & Carbon Co.
THAT a tunnel was drilled
app. dist. 3.75 mis.
to divert water (from New River)
to hydroelectric plant (Gauley Junction).
THAT in most of the tunnel, drilled rock contained
90—even 99 percent pure silica.
This is a fact that was known.
THAT silica is dangerous to lungs of human beings.
When submitted to contact. Silicosis.
THAT the effects are well known.
Disease incurable.
Physical incapacity, cases fatal.
THAT the Bureau of Mines has warned for twenty years.
THAT prevention is: wet drilling, ventilation,
respirators, vacuum drills.
Disregard : utter. Dust : collected. Visibility : low.
Workmen left work, white with dust.
Air system : inadequate.
It was quite cloudy in there.
When the drills were going, in all the smoke and dust,
it seemed like a gang of airplanes going through
that tunnel.
Respirators, not furnished.
I have seen men with masks, but simply on their breasts.
I have seen two wear them.
Drills : dry drilling, for speed, for saving.
A fellow could drill three holes dry for one hole wet.
They went so fast they didn't square at the top.
Locomotives : gasoline. Suffering from monoxide gas.
There have been men that fell in the tunnel. They had
to be carried out.
The driving of the tunnel.
It was begun, continued, completed, with gravest disregard.
And the employees? Their health, lives, future?
Results and infection.
Many died. Many are not yet dead.
Of negligence. Wilful or inexcusable.
Further findings:
Prevalence : many States, mine, tunnel operations.
A greatest menace.
We suggest hearings be read.
This is the dark. Lights strung up all the way.
Depression; and, driven deeper in,
by hunger, pistols, and despair,
they took the tunnel.
Of the contracting firm
P. H. Faulconer, Pres.
E. J. Perkins, Vice-Pres.
have declined to appear.
They have no knowledge of deaths from silicosis.
However, their firm paid claims.
I want to point out that under the statute $500 or
$1000, but no more, may be recovered.
We recommend.
Bring them. Their books and records.
Investigate. Require.
Can do no more.
These citizens from many States
paying the price for electric power,
To Be Vindicated.
“If by their suffering and death they will have made a future life safer for work beneath the earth, if they will have been able to establish a new and greater regard for human life in industry, their suffering may not have been in vain.”
Respectfully,
Glenn Griswold
Chairman, Subcommittee
Vito Marcantonio
W. P. Lambertson
Matthew A. Dunn
The subcommittee subcommits.
Words on a monument.
Capitoline thunder. It cannot be enough.
The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown's body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.
THE BOOK OF THE DEAD
These roads will take you into your own country.
Seasons and maps coming where this road comes
into a landscape mirrored in these men.
Past all your influences, your home river,
constellations of cities, mottoes of childhood,
parents and easy cures, war, all evasion's wishes.
What one word must never be said?
Dead, and these men fight off our dying,
cough in the theatres of the war.
What two things shall never be seen?<
br />
They : what we did. Enemy : what we mean.
This is a nation's scene and halfway house.
What three things can never be done?
Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.
The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.
The facts of war forced into actual grace.
Seasons and modern glory. Told in the histories,
how first ships came
seeing on the Atlantic thirteen clouds
lining the west horizon with their white
shining halations;
they conquered, throwing off impossible Europe—
could not be used to transform; created coast—
breathed-in America.
See how they took the land, made after-life
fresh out of exile, planted the pioneer
base and blockade,
pushed forests down in an implacable walk
west where new clouds lay at the desirable
body of sunset;
taking the seaboard. Replaced the isolation,
dropped cities where they stood, drew a tidewater
frontier of Europe,
a moment, and another frontier held,
this land was planted home-land that we know.
Ridge of discovery,
until we walk to windows, seeing America
lie in a photograph of power, widened
before our forehead,
and still behind us falls another glory,
London unshaken, the long French road to Spain,
the old Mediterranean
flashing new signals from the hero hills
near Barcelona, monuments and powers,
parent defenses.
Before our face the broad and concrete west,
green ripened field, frontier pushed back like river
controlled and dammed;
the flashing wheatfields, cities, lunar plains
grey in Nevada, the sane fantastic country
sharp in the south,
liveoak, the hanging moss, a world of desert,
the dead, the lava, and the extreme arisen
fountains of life,
the flourished land, peopled with watercourses
to California and the colored sea;
sums of frontiers
and unmade boundaries of acts and poems,
the brilliant scene between the seas, and standing,
this fact and this disease.
Half-memories absorb us, and our ritual world
carries its history in familiar eyes,
planted in flesh it signifies its music
in minds which turn to sleep and memory,
in music knowing all the shimmering names,
the spear, the castle, and the rose.
But planted in our flesh these valleys stand,
everywhere we begin to know the illness,
are forced up, and our times confirm us all.
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 14
