Ames By-Products

That was its business name, but everybody in town

called it the rendering works, and it stood in its stink

on the wooded west bank of the Skunk, its parking lot

half full of run-down trucks nosed into carcasses

piled at the downwind side, brown, rank, and bloating.

Through willows that grew on the riverbank I once saw

one of the workers using the dusty flank of a horse

as a bench to eat his lunch, the sandwich wrapper

a glitter of flies on the hide beside him.

Out of a pipe like a piece of gut, a gray-blue trickle

had eaten its way across a grassy mud bar,

and the Skunk brought bullheads lipping up to it,

the fightingest and fattest up and down the river,

and we had fished it all the way from Soper’s Mill

down to the high Chicago and North Western trestle

beneath which our childhood was flowing away.

There was a girl in our sixth-grade class whose father

worked at the rendering works, up to his elbows in blood

gone wormy, blue, and curdling, a poor man growing

poorer by the year, blue cotton shirts worn as thin

as window screens along the clothesline in their yard.

She was taller and older than us from having moved

from school to school, and had big, interesting breasts

before the other girls had any, and it made us mean

as snakes. We pinched our noses behind her back,

as if she stank, though she was always clean and combed,

cycling her few good dresses through the weeks.

She did their laundry, hung out the wash, showing

a good part of her legs as she bent to the basket,

and it seemed it was only the two of them there

as we rode our bikes past, over and over again.

She was cool and aloof in our schoolroom, her eyes

disdaining ours, already a woman, inexplicable,

and then one day she was gone, her father’s damp shirts

gone from the sagging rope and the screen door hooked

forever over who she may have been behind it.