Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman

For Valerie

The bulldozer stands short as a boot on its heel-high ripple soles;

it has toecapped stumps aside all day, scuffed earth and trampled rocks

making a hobnailed dyke downstream of raw clay shoals.

Its work will hold water. The man who bounced high on the box

seat, exercising levers, would swear a full frontal orthodox

oath to that. First he shaved off the grizzled scrub

with that front-end safety razor supplied by the school of hard knocks

then he knuckled down and ground his irons properly; they copped many a harsh rub.

At knock-off time, spilling thunder, he surfaced like a sub.

Speaking of razors, the workshop amazes with its strop,

its elapsing leather drive-belt angled to the slapstick flow

of fast work in the Chaplin age; tightened, it runs like syrup,

streams like a mill-sluice, fiddles like a glazed virtuoso.

With the straitlaced summary cut of Sam Brownes long ago

it is the last of the drawn lash and bullocking muscle

left in engineering. It’s where the panther leaping, his swift shadow

and all such free images turned plastic. Here they dwindle, dense with oil,

like a skein between tough factory hands, pulley and diesel.

Shaking in slow low flight, with its span of many jets,

the combine seeder at nightfall swimming over flat land

is a style of machinery we’d imagined for the fictional planets:

in the high glassed cabin, above vapour-pencilling floodlights, a hand,

gloved against the cold, hunts along the medium-wave band

for company of Earth voices; it crosses speech garble music—

the Brandenburg Conch the Who the Illyrian High Command—

as seed wheat in the hoppers shakes down, being laced into the thick

night-dampening plains soil, and the stars waver out and stick.

Flags and a taut fence discipline the mountain pasture

where giant upturned mushrooms gape mildly at the sky

catching otherworld pollen. Poppy-smooth or waffle-ironed, each armature

distils wild and white sound. These, Earth’s first antennae

tranquilly angled outwards, to a black, not a gold infinity,

swallow the millionfold numbers that print out as a risen

glorious Apollo. They speak control to satellites in high

bursts of algorithm. And some of them are tuned to win

answers to fair questions, viz. What is the Universe in?

How many metal-bra and trumpet-flaring film extravaganzas

underlie the progress of the space shuttle’s Ground Transporter Vehicle

across macadam-surfaced Florida? Atop oncreeping house-high panzers,

towering drydock and ocean-liner decks, there perches a gridiron football

field in gradual motion; it is the god-platform; it sustains the bridal

skyscraper of liquid Cool, and the rockets borrowed from the Superman

and the bricked aeroplane of Bustout-and-return, all vertical,

conjoined and myth-huge, approaching the starred gantry where human

lightning will crack, extend, and vanish upwards from this caravan.

            Gold-masked, the foetal warrior

            unslipping on a flawless floor,

            I backpack air; my life machine

            breathes me head-Earthwards, speaks the Choctaw

            of tech-talk that earths our discipline—

            but the home world now seems outside-in;

            I marvel that here background’s so fore

            and sheathe my arms in the unseen

            a dream in images unrecalled

            from any past takes me I soar

            at the heart of fall on a drifting line

            this is the nearest I have been

            to oneness with the everted world

            the unsinking leap   the stone unfurled

In a derelict village picture show I will find a projector,

dust-matted, but with film in its drum magazines, and the lens

mysteriously clean. The film will be called Insensate Violence,

no plot, no characters, just shoot burn scream beg claw

bayonet trample brains—I will hit the reverse switch then, in conscience,

and the thing will run backwards, unlike its coeval the machine-gun;

blood will unspill, fighters lift and surge apart; horror will be undone

and I will come out to a large town, bright parrots round the saleyard pens

and my people’s faces healed of a bitter sophistication.

The more I act, the stiller I become;

the less I’m lit, the more spellbound my crowd;

I accept all colours, and with a warming hum

I turn them white and hide them in a cloud.

To give long life is a power I’m allowed

by my servant, Death. I am what you can’t sell

at the world’s end—and if you’re still beetle-browed

try some of my treasures: an adult bird in its shell

or a pink porker in his own gut, Fritz the Abstract Animal.

No riddles about a crane. This one drops a black clanger on cars

and the palm of its four-thumbed steel hand is a raptor of wrecked tubing;

the ones up the highway hoist porridgy concrete, long spars

and the local skyline; whether raising aloft on a string

bizarre workaday angels, or letting down a rotating

man on a sphere, these machines are inclined to maintain

a peace like world war, in which we turn over everything

to provide unceasing victories. Now the fluent lines stop, and strain

engrosses this tower on the frontier of junk, this crane.

Before a landscape sprouts those giant stepladders that pump oil

or before far out iron mosquitoes attach to the sea

there is this sortilege with phones that plug into mapped soil,

the odd gelignite bump to shake trucks, paper scribbling out serially

as men dial Barrier Reefs long enfolded beneath the geology

or listen for black Freudian beaches; they seek a miles-wide pustular

rock dome of pure Crude, a St Paul’s-in-profundis. There are many

wrong numbers on the geophone, but it’s brought us some distance, and by car.

Every machine has been love and a true answer.

Not a high studded ship boiling cauliflower under her keel

nor a ghost in bootlaced canvas—just a length of country road

afloat between two shores, winding wet wire rope reel-to-reel,

dismissing romance sternwards. Six cars and a hay truck are her load

plus a thoughtful human cast which could, in some dramatic episode,

become a world. All machines in the end join God’s creation

growing bygone, given, changeless—but a river ferry has its timeless mode

from the grinding reedy outset; it enforces contemplation.

We arrive. We traverse depth in thudding silence. We go on.