Issue 14, December 1997
Chuck deVarennes - Two Poems

A hard freeze saves the leaf season.
Tourists will blunder through the town
filling tills with cash and credit
card slips to feed local people
through the white winter’s Baptist chill.

Even the jack-booted school board
can sense the time will soon be come
when big urban money will rule
their county, and fat taxes drive
the locals out to some place else.

Small shopkeepers will raise their rates
on tourist junk and fake antiques
until chain stores gobble them up.
The highway will be widened
to carry the city traffic

crawling to unproductive jobs
that pay their children’s tuitions
and boarding fees at private schools. 
The children learn, in their own turn, 
how to pay homage to Mammon.

Trees will live on the steepest slopes
where houses cost too much to build.
Forests will fall till what remains
are scenes for real estate brochures
reflected through custom windows.

The mountains cleaned of rusty cars
and people wearing overalls. 
Hill folk will live in picture books,
archived with all extinct species
underneath thick museum glass. 

Ghostly concrete trucks howl through the morning mud.
They pull up close to the monstrous pump
and flip their chutes down towards its hopper.
Last nights storm clouds obscure the moon.
The trucks' big drums change direction, and mud
feeds the beast whose violent heart pumps
fluid stone four floors up.

Wet concrete flows thickly through the pump's snout.
Bent backs pull the heavy hose across the metal deck.
Rubber boots hook meshed wire and send men sprawling.
Brutal dance under quartz lights at 5:30 A.M.
Concrete eats a man's skin.
Pump hose coupling smash his fingers.

Men shout their songs, curse each other and cry out 
for more water to make the concrete flow.
They slam come-alongs into a dry pile and pull it down.
Two take a sixteen foot screed, lay it on the gray mud,
pull it flat and chase the come-alongs' frantic chopping.

A long handled bull float glides the gray lake
and smoothes the surface with an artist's care.
For sixteen thousand square feet
men's hearts match the pump's violent beat,
bay after bay, till quartz lights give way 
to the cloudy dawn.

It's a delicate moment of truth
when the concrete takes off, and it's just hard enough.
Finishers pull cords to start troweling machines.
They lean on the handles and guide whirling blades
until the slab shines—a hard black gleam.