If you have a nose for power, drawing a deep inspirational breath
from the approachable majesty of nature, the long view of history, and intriguing
vagaries of human expression, can be a tricky business. Nonetheless, poet David
Salner, thus nasally endowed, sallies forth undaunted. On the exhale, he brings
all of himself to his work, laying bare a certitude of sensibility he developed
early on to defend against the unfathomables of a chaotic childhood. Always seated with portfolio in this
collection is a strategic instinct for what to do next in a life built around improving
the fortunes of the potentially powerful cohort he half-inherited and fully
chose to ally himself with: the working class.
Salner is not the poet you go to for an extended soak in the hoped-for healing waters
of familial sentimentality. He does not extrude a palatable social
patriotic line of verse larded with unctuous tributes to national borders you
fully know were drawn in blood to suit the whims of kings and the schemes of
robber barons. Yet, in Salner’s images, you find a dependable homing resonance.
If his head is (exploratorily) in the clouds, his feet are determinedly
planted on whatever turf he happens to find himself. It might be a river bank,
the factory floor, or a stance he assumes, the better to take measure of the crosscut
of his life and a penetrating look at what moves his social class to act on its
own behalf. He constructs what an earlier history-intoxicated poet, W.H. Auden,
called “the furniture of home,” and so there is no mystery or mystification
about where Salner is at and why. He
co-locates what is deadening about the workday right alongside what catches you
by surprise on a random midnight shift, when a coworker’s brief comment sums up
an instant while he bluntly imparts how to avert what would have ended in
disaster. Salner invites you to glance at the sky through the confines of a
hospital stay just to show you that, though caught in a time warp, and though
simultaneously flattened and flattered by the spangle of morphine, something
not a little miraculous can still dance on your horizon.
Here’s are two such excerpts from first poem in the collection, “A Dream of Quitting Time”:
1. Desert Foundry
Still t-shirt weather in this makeshift place,
a corrugated roof with I-beams,
a desert foundry full of sand.
I stare through gaps and rust holes,
beyond rimrock and cactus. Outside,
the shadow of Camelback Mountain
darkens a line of palms. Each frond
waves in a slow waltz on this calm
late afternoon. Rush-hour traffic dies away.
Coronas of blue fumes still circle creosote,
that greasy plant, and choke the leaves
of fleshy aloe vera. So much pain and sacrifice
soaked up by desert flora.
Somewhere in the background,
the carriage of a crane sings over rails, grinding wheels
hiss sand, a furnace arcs and rumbles
like the earth was gnashing its teeth.
The day cools. The light beyond the foundry
dissolves into a mid-December sky, a sheen
of desert turquoise, a glow that lingers,
reluctant as the last words of a dream.
6. Desert Whispers
I spend Christmas in a hospital,
stare through the window as the valley sun
falls behind a hump of Camelback, vanishes
with the last brisk winter light. A slice of moon
rises above the map of Arizona,
over Buckeye and Surprise and Tombstone.
My hand explores my body, down to my toes,
and I discover that I’m still all there, or almost.
The night sky floods my room, bathes monitors and tubes
in waltz-time gray, sweeps over the see-through
bag my morphine seeps from, splashes me with light
from dying galaxies, black holes and neon stars,
where boom towns come to life and half-lit ghosts
still prowl the dusty streets of Bisbee.
. . . and a third from “Burning Magnesium”:
I’d been stacking forty pound ingots in the heat, working to the point of exhaustion. I walked to the open furnace, attracted by the way it shone in the darkness, fascinated by the peaceful appearance of the liquid, so ordinary, like a pool of water, a small swimming pool.
This was my first shift in the foundry, my first view of a furnace of magnesium at 1300f.
A waist-high rim of bricks was all that separated me from the glowing pool inches away. As I stared, a change took shape in the depths of the furnace. The core was now suffused with a faint rose shadow that deepened before my eyes, as if the metal had come alive, blushing.
I stood over the furnace as my face baked, my skin a crust of heat. I was transfixed by the flux, now blood-red, but changing again, rising, blooming from the depths of the coloration, swelling until the silver skin of the metal began to split. An open wound, then another, another. Dozens of strawberry blisters riddled the sheen.
“Turn that fucking furnace down,” a voice boomed. “The damn metal’s burning.”
Someone in another room dialed the furnace temperature down, and the blush began to subside. That individual was not a doctor but, I later discovered, a metal refinery operator, an MRO. Meanwhile, someone else ran to the brick rim and sprinkled a dust of lemon-colored sulfur on the blisters, choking the burns, healing the skin.
I’d learned that magnesium is not so much a metal as a creature that needs to be nursed.
The furnace was peaceful again. A silver sheen covered it and hid the suffering flesh.
The tricky business element could entice a poet to write his voice large, so
that it registers like a serialized voiceover, reducing the experience of a
worker’s life to a blustery, elusive weather system. To Salner, it is just the
opposite: a working person’s life can be neither cut nor fashioned to fit a
lexicon and caricature meant to pitch low balls to the class that bankers,
landlords, and company bosses fear most and therefore despise. Here’s an homage
to women miners who give the lie to that specie of reduction:
“For the Women of Eveleth Mines”
You walked into a mill—
balancing on steel rods, which rolled
like logs—and stumbled, just like a man
would stumble; you laid track
and pinched your hand between the rails—
your hand turned purple-black,
bruised just like a man’s; you cut your arm
on the knife-edge of a pillow block
which made you bleed just like a man—the rich
pink tissue, the gash into your life—
you had to wash it out
and bandage it
and keep on working
just like a man; you torched a wear plate
in a chute—a shower of white-hot sparks
burned through your coveralls, but you
kept working,
shimmied up chutes,
stacked plates on grate all midnight shift,
got held two hours overtime, cursed
the boredom, bit your lip
just like a man, stacked more plates
till you could taste the salt of your blood
mix with the metal grit. You worked
just like a man till they did something
they wouldn’t do to any man.
Salner’s tributes extend to figures in history, some of them literary, in whose
prose or verse he finds an echo of his own provenance or more than a whiff of licensed
prophecy. Consider these two tributes:
“Dry-Dock Music: Baltimore”
“It was therefore an act of supreme trust on the part
of a freeman of color thus to put in jeopardy
his liberty that another might be free.”
—The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
Surprising, most of all,
Stanley himself…. On the way to work that day,
he walks through clouds of cinnamon, an amber fog
enveloping the port, all the way to Fells Point
and the dry docks, where he works
building a ship with a four-pound mallet,
driving cotton-white strands between oak planks,
sealing a sharp-built hull with oakum
from keel to turn of bilge. Dry-dock music
freights the air, saw-scrape and mallet-knock,
chatter of carpenter and caulker,
craftsman and slave, of black and Irish
joined in an uneasy hug of labor. He knows the trades,
sailing and caulking, and others that a free man needs
in this slave port, like how to keep his freedom papers
always in his pocket, for the eagle stamp
protects him from slave catchers, the lowest form
of life, who love the music of another’s chains.
His papers say that he was born right here,
born free, but it was in the port of Charleston,
when he was just 15, that two white sailors
who hated slavery, grabbed him by the arms
and told a port patrolman, “This here’s
the cabin boy of our good ship, the Mother Mary.
His name is Stanley Johnson—he’s had a bit
and captain needs him sober, so let us pass.”
He had the wherewithal to play the drunk,
although he’d never had a sip, not then,
and with their help, he slipped
the chains of bondage, set sail on Mother Mary,
kidnapped into freedom. From that day on,
he’s worked on ships, on shipboard only,
where he feels free. Now that he’s old,
the ships he works on are in dry dock,
his papers always in his pocket.
They describe the bearer by his age,
color, height. . . . But they could just as easily
describe a man named Frederick, on his way
to freedom, with papers in his pocket
in the name of Stanley Johnson
“Milton”
Your friends did not fare well.
James Naylor, skin flayed off
his back, tongue gored through
with hot iron, branded, released
on the road to Yorkshire, where
four thugs beat him to death.
Natural causes took another, but
the king’s men dug up the corpse,
hung it, stuck the head on a pole,
displayed it for twenty years
at Westminster Hall. Your name
was on their list. You sat there,
blind, composing your epic
of Man’s first disobedience,
not knowing when they’d come.
And still, they gather in the dark
outside that room of light
If discovery is more your thing more than recovery, why not take a
break from Mary Oliver, and pick up David Salner? Then share him with your coworkers and the
generations reaching for victory who you’re betting on to follow you into the
breach.
David Salner has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has worked across
the U.S. as an iron ore miner, steelworker, machinist, bus driver, cab driver,
garment laborer, and longshoreman. He now works as a library clerk in a
Delaware shore town.
Eveleth Taconite, one of the iron ore mines he worked in, was featured in the Hollywood movie North Country, starring Charlize Theron.
Salner won the 2016 Lascaux Prize for Poetry and the Oboh Prize. He has received seven Pushcart Prize nominations and on three occasions Garrison Keillor read Salner’s work on the NPR show, Writer’s Almanac.
He is currently finishing work on a novel set in the 1920s about a fugitive from Montana vigilantes who works on the great Holland Tunnel project and finds shelter among the poor Jews of the Lower East Side.
Toba Singer