She enters her cab and smells last night’s driver.
the Old Spice, the sweat. Cigarette ashes swirl
inside the glass gondola as she pushes
the steel door closed, folds herself into
the hard cup of her seat and prepares to boot up
the machine that crouches at the edge of the bay.
Beneath her forearms, polished steel panels
studded with buttons, blinking domes and switches
await her fingers. A large lever rises from either side,
topped by the knobs she’ll clutch until day’s end.
She bends forward, feet planted on the glass floor,
torso resting against her thighs, knees wide,
straining over them as if to polish her toenails.
The seatbelt slices her in half, a thread between her,
the glass envelope of her workplace and the blacktop
fifteen stories below. She lets out the cable,
drops her rack and aims for the forty-foot box
that appears in miniature beneath her.
She guesses the edges, corners and pockets
below her cab as she lets down fast to cap
the container with her forty foot rack and
lock onto forty tons of cargo. It used to be like
groping for light. Now she can feel where it is.
Hoisting the load up she leans one lever
toward the ship. The cab surges forward
on its horizontal boom. It crosses the dock apron
clears the ship’s rail and hovers as she aims
before sliding the can into a cell below deck.
She pulls her rack out, drags the lever back
and drops to the dock.
This is the arc she travels as she races from ship
to shore, loading and discharging containers
thirty times each hour. Her slams
resound above the din of the semis and strads
with each push into the tight cells that
swallow the boxes, steel eating steel. She forgets to
breathe, prays instead, squeezing inside the dark holes,
pumping, fingers cramped, knees burning,
suppressing the desire to view the mountains
because it’s up to her when the ship sails,
when everyone goes home.
