The Language of Mines

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.