Impossible to write
without the culm dumps glowing at the edges
of the county line.
And difficult to think beyond the cellars
of our houses in West Scranton,
where the coal bins glistened with black ice.
The anthracite of meaning can’t be dug
without a shovel. Words
are picks, sharp axes, spades.
We look to heaven as the last resort
but still those thunderheads grow bruises
over low-slung Lackawanna hills.
The winds crawl slowly with their sulfur fumes.
A burnt-out breaker just behind our school
adds little to this blue-bleak world
except the embers of what happened,
how the ground once gave us so much more.
We’re full of grand abstractions now
in far-off cities of another plain.
We’ve all gone elsewhere just to dig.