Mrs. Natura upstairs shushes us: it’s time:
for her late husband’s favorite show: a real factory rat,
he was: familiar with how blue windows cast gigantic pools
of blue light: how whole shifts lined up for salt in July:
how clouds formed in the plant rafters
and then soaked everyone with warm indoor rain:
and how coolant, gray as doubtful milk,
gushed uncontrolled over a lathe’s turntable.
For thirty years he stared at X-rays: looking for flaws:
transfixed by the eye-blue sky-blue images,
thinking about nothing or nothing much or else
imagining how his life was going to end one day.
Would it kill us, she says, to be quiet
for fifteen goddamn minutes?
We could learn about how things were made.
although we already knew a lot of it: how colossal
stamps could make a crepe of a human hand:
how tuna came in tins that aren’t made of tin:
how chickens were fed and slaughtered
and deboned and gutted in the modern way.
Apparently chickens like being modern.
