Mill Towns

by Brett Rutherford

Old factories:

how painfully forgotten!

Once, the hopeful immigrants flocked to them.

Workers and foremen built cities around them,

if not exactly blessing the ground they stood on,

grateful at least to have escaped the whip

     or starvation back where they came from.

The railroads webbed out to meet them,

branch lines and sidings eager to take

the crates and bundles outside their gates.

Without them

     the towns have forgotten the reason

          of their founding.

What did they make?

cotton and calico prints,

steam engines and locomotives

parts of machines uncountable

and the tools to make other machines

and their parts uncountable,

rope walks, brass foundries,

lace- and jewelry-making,

light bulb assembly lines,

refrigerators and fountain pens,

and glory! a piano factory —

all now only names in peeling paint

checkered on bricks and falling signs. 

The nearby houses are humbled now

with torn clapboards,

rot beneath the stage paint of shingles,

the cheap bluster of aluminum siding,

walls bloated, foundations shifted,

split into rat-cell studios for commuters.

Many are boarded-up, foreclosed.

No one remembers when mansard slate

and gable and cupola gleamed new,

when a smokestack with a man’s name on it

was a place arrived at as a good sign

of a continued paycheck.

Things that got made here,

kept getting made.

Now these sad brick temples accuse us:

their plywood-covered windows,

their undecipherable placards,

the weed-trees on their loading docks,

the mystery of abandonment.

Like unburied dead they haunt the roadside,

somber in daylight, shunned and abhorred

when their shadows grow long at dusk.

They will not burn, their wearing away

protracted by fences and guardians.

(Heirs living on compounded interest

preserve them like Chinese puzzle boxes

they cannot open or understand.)

At night, another commerce lights up

the sidewalks along the chain-link fence

as women sell the only thing they have

from the pavement, and men in cars

circle, circle, hands offering dollars,

other hands offering, and taking, small

envelopes of powders and crystals.

Some midnights, the ghost machines awaken,

their ungreased axles screaming,

drive shafts spinning of their own accord.

A dynamo turns, and furnace mouths flicker

in the cool blue flame of St. Elmo’s Fire.

The power looms weave an invisible shroud:

it is long enough to enclose a city.

Tombs without occupants,

they wait for the rites that no one will pronounce.

—Pawtucket, Rhode Island, late 1980s.

From Poems from Providence, 1991.