Among Ruins

Robert Gibb

• Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268102128
• Thema: Letteratura
• Thema: Poesia americana

Among Ruins is the final volume of Homestead Works, a collection of four books of poetry that explore the industrial past and legacy of the old steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and, by extension, Pittsburgh.

III

“Beauties of the Common Tool”

Photographs by Walker Evans, Fortune, July 1955

Pliers, tin snips, crescent wrench …

He’s centered each one in the field

Of his undivided attention,

Where it seems to float suspended

In a world of mists, inviting the hand

To test its heft and balance,

The eye to admire the way he’s lit

The sleek and sculptural metal—

That graphite shimmer

That’s equal parts hardware and art.

After all, there is no part of them

Which does not fit perfectly

With whatever task they’ve been set.

Including the photographs’

Where light’s been made to coalesce

In each dense, mist-bound shape,

Forged steel alluring as a magnet,

The planet of its page.

Industrial Pittsburgh: Works on Paper

1. Whistler on the Smithfield Street Bridge

Winter twilight, the last flights of pigeons

Wheeling home above the river,

Wisps of cirrus like scratches in glass.

Again tonight the great buildings have turned

Transparent, their weightless sides

The same gray as the sky—an equilibrium

He knows will soon give way to the darkness

Massing in their shapes, to mill smoke

And gas lamps erasing the terraced stars.

But for now, from the bow of the bridge,

Scumblings of mist on the river,

Pittsburgh looks celestial, hovering in midair,

The way water does in the distance

Above whatever mirror might cast it there.

2. Turner in Homestead

Unmistakable—the way the landscape,

Which is light on water, becomes the sky

And Homestead the river-hemmed Venice

He’s painted keelmen floating coal to at night,

The red flecks of their deck lamps

Daubed within the loose notational haze.

Those flat black shadows are steel mills,

Vast as the Doge’s Palace, stretching back

Along the floodplain. Come daylight

He’ll render their smoke as drifting plumes

Low on the watery horizon, stoked ovens

Howling in a blizzard of pastels …

It’s there in his sketches, that pairing of light

With coal fires burning on the river at night.

3. Piranesi Discovers Open Hearth #5

Conte crayons and sketchpads, their pages

Packed with the soot-black shadows

Cast by catwalks, chimneys, scaffolds—

All in that welter of piled-up perspectives

We’ve come to recognize as his: a space

Both cavernous and congested. It’s as though

Here in the mills he’s entered one of his own

Imaginary prisons, their fantastic maze

Of chambers no less starved for light.

Hoist chains and rafters. The train tracks

And carriages of the overhead cranes, slabs

Stacked by them to a tenement height.

Yet in here everything is under, a necropolis

Right from his dreams. He can’t get over it.

Dreiser First Glimpses Sister Carrie in the Stacks of the Carnegie Library

Pittsburgh, 1893

Barely weeks at his dream job, working

A beat, and he’s holed up in the library,

Snug inside an alcove on a rainy afternoon,

Light mullioned in the lead-glass windows.

All month he’s been burrowing his way

Through Balzac: Père Goriot and Cousin Pons,

The Great Man of the Provinces …

“Open pictures of self-indulgence and vice,”

Like ones he’s found spread all around him—

Red-light districts the size of wards,

Gaming houses and pool halls

Where aldermen idle on the public dime.

“We don’t touch on labor conditions,”

He’d been warned the first day at the paper,

Or “scandals in high life,” or “the rich

and religious in a derogatory sense.”

But here in Balzac’s teeming chapters

He’s glimpsed a mode of approach

Whose manner he might follow

Into every corner of the human moil.

“To go to the city,” he’d once proclaimed,

“is the changeless desire of the mind.”

Now that he’s done so he’s come to believe

That all such desires are “chemic,”

Part of the tangle of circumstance

And chance, the very contagion of things

Among which he’ll soon loose Carrie Meeber,

The vague entourage of her dreams.

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