Shirt – by Robert Pinsky
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes–
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers–
Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”
Wonderful how the patern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
More links about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire at Pandagon.
That just rips me up. I didn’t know anything about this. Those photos — those images of the man holding women out to drop them — that last stanza. I’m just in tears here.
I know, tracey – Ive actually had nightmares that I was in the triangle shirtwaist fire. It must have been beyond belief horrible. They could not, flat out, get out of the building. They could not fight for their lives … because there was no way out. I mean … my GOD. The photos of the anonymous coffins – with the women’s bodies in it – kill me.THE images of those women flying through the air … It kills me. There’s a really good book about it called The Triangle Fire – the book really captures the magnitude of that event. It completely rocked the entire island.
makes you just SHIVER.
Thank you for posting that poem. I had never seen it before. Horrifying and yet beautiful. (I’m reminded of 9/11, of the people who leapt out of the Towers to their deaths, because dying from a fall was preferable to perishing in the fire).
This is not exactly the same. But it nails me down just like that.
“One Minute of Night Sky
John Engman
I worked for a year in the cellar
of an airtight clinic, trudged through a valley of cabinets
in a gray smock. My job was filing bulging folders of the dead:
I carried a wire basket through the alphabet, dumping envelopes
of aneurism, cancer and cerebral lesion into yawning racks.
I could travel decades in a few steps,
stop and page through a chart until
I was in the blue hills west of brain damage, dwindling hills
and rivers of red that met in flatlands on a black horizon,
ticker tape from a encephalograph. Stapled on last
reports of death there was a small snapshot from the morgue,
a face no larger than my thumbprint.
The work made me sick.
Reading histories of tumors and fatal transplants
until the lines on the graphs convulsed and snarled like wiring
come loose in a circuit for the mind of God. Once, I saw
close-ups of the malignancy which killed a man my age,
nothing much on the X-ray,
a blemish vague as memory,
a burr which swam through the nervous systems into his brain.
I could have sworn he was staring back at me from his worn
snapshot but, of course he wasn’t. He couldn’t. His eyes
were shut. I put him away with unusual force and heard
his chart jar the rack, as if something
small had gone off, a mousetrap.
The next day I quit. For the first night in weeks, I slept.
But in my deepest sleep, even now, if the chemicals balance
and tissues are ripe, a synapse forms the memory: iron
spring slips, the trap shuts, and my eyes fly open and all
the darkness around me wakes.
Supposedly, each human being
has a built in mechanism for one minute of knowing
he or she will someday die. One minute of night sky: life
going on across the street where someone greets darkness
with tins of food and drink, where someone listens, pauses
by the door and throws the bolt and lets the animal in.”
redclay – Good God, that is gorgeous. Thank you. I’ve never heard that before.
http://www.shorpy.com/girls-kiss-rescuer-at-fire