Smoke like the clocks and whistles, always.

Smoke nights now.

Tomorrow something else.

* * *

Luck moons come and go:

Five men swim in a pot of red steel.

Their bones are kneaded into the bread of steel:

Their bones are knocked into coils and anvils

And the sucking plungers of sea-fighting turbines.

Look for them in the woven frame of a wireless station.

So ghosts hide in steel like heavy-armed men in mirrors.

Peepers, skulkers—they shadow-dance in laughing tombs.

They are always there and they never answer.

One of them said: “I like my job, the company is good to me, America is a wonderful country.”

One: “Jesus, my bones ache; the company is a liar; this is a free country, like hell.”

One: “I got a girl, a peach; we save up and go on a farm and raise pigs and be the boss ourselves.”

And the others were roughneck singers a long ways from home.

Look for them back of a steel vault door.

They laugh at the cost.

They lift the birdmen into the blue.

It is steel a motor sings and zooms.

In the subway plugs and drums,

In the slow hydraulic drills, in gumbo or gravel,

Under dynamo shafts in the webs of armature spiders.

They shadow-dance and laugh at the cost.

* * *

The ovens light a red dome.

Spools of fire wind and wind.

Quadrangles of crimson sputter.

The lashes of dying maroon let down.

Fire and wind wash out the slag.

Forever the slag gets washed in fire and wind.

The anthem learned by the steel is:

Do this or go hungry.

Look for our rust on a plow.

Listen to us in a threshing-engine razz.

Look at our job in the running wagon wheat.

* * *

Fire and wind wash at the slag.

Box-cars, clocks, steam-shovels, churns, pistons, boilers, scissors—

Oh, the sleeping slag from the mountains, the slag-heavy pig-iron will go down many roads.

Men will stab and shoot with it, and make butter and tunnel rivers, and mow hay in swaths, and slit hogs and skin beeves, and steer airplanes across North America, Europe, Asia, round the world.

Hacked from a hard rock country, broken and baked in mills and smelters, the rusty dust waits

Till the clean hard weave of its atoms cripples and blunts the drills chewing a hole in it.

The steel of its plinths and flanges is reckoned, O God, in one-millionth of an inch.

* * *

Once when I saw the curves of fire, the rough scarf women dancing,

Dancing out of the flues and smokestacks—flying hair of fire, flying feet upside down;

Buckets and baskets of fire exploding and chortling, fire running wild out of the steady and fastened ovens;

Sparks cracking a harr-harr-huff from a solar-plexus of rock-ribs of the earth taking a laugh for themselves;

Ears and noses of fire, gibbering gorilla arms of fire, gold mud-pies, gold bird-wings, red jackets riding purple mules, scarlet autocrats tumbling from the humps of camels, assassinated czars straddling vermilion balloons;