the working life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teavjYI9pdM&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI9K8ZJqAwE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcx4xSi6s78

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkQ58I53mjk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2C40LnfoSY

FACTORY TIME

Tom Wayman

From: Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993. Madeira Park, B.C. : Harbour Pub., c1993.

The day divides neatly into four parts

marked off by the breaks. The first quarter

is a full two hours, 7:30 to 9:30, but that's okay

in theory, because I'm supposed to be fresh, but in fact

after some evenings it's a long first two hours.

Then, a ten-minute break. Which is good

another way, too: the second quarter

thus has ten minutes knocked off, 9:40 to 11:30

which is only 110 minutes, or

to put it another way, if I look at my watch

and it says 11:10

I can cheer up because if I had still been in the first

quarter

and had worked for 90 minutes there would be

30 minutes to go, but now there is only

20. If it had been the first quarter, I could expect

the same feeling at 9 o'clock as here I have

when it is already ten minutes after 11.

Then it's lunch: a stretch, and maybe a little walk around.

And at 12 sharp the endless quarter begins:

a full two afternoon hours. And it's only the start

of the afternoon. Nothing to hope for the whole time.

Come to think of it, today

is probably only Tuesday. Or worse, Monday,

with the week barely begun and the day

only just half over, four hours down

and 36 to go this week

(if the foreman doesn't come padding by about 3

some afternoon and ask us all to work overtime).

Now while I'm trying to get through this early Tuesday

afternoon

maybe this is a good place to say

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday have their personalities too.

As a matter of fact, Wednesday after lunch

I could be almost happy

because when that 12 noon hooter blast goes

the week is precisely and officially half over.

All downhill from here: Thursday, as you know

is the day before Friday

which means a little celebrating Thursday night

—perhaps a few rounds in the pub after supper--

won't do me any harm. If I don't get much sleep

Thursday night, so what? I can sleep in Saturday.

And Friday right after lunch Mike the foreman appears

with the long cheques dripping out of his hands

and he is so polite to each of us as he passes them over

just like they taught him in foreman school.

After that, not too much gets done.

People go away into a corner and add and subtract like crazy

trying to catch the Company in a mistake

or figuring out what incredible percentage the government

has taken this week, or what the money will actually mean

in terms of savings or payments--and me, too.

But wait. It's still Tuesday afternoon.

And only the first half of that: all the minutes

until 2—which comes at last

and everyone drops what they are doing

if they hadn't already been drifting toward

their lunchboxes, or edging between the parts-racks

in the direction of the caterer's carts

which always appear a few minutes before the hooter

and may be taken on good authority as incontrovertible proof

that 2 o'clock is actually going to arrive.

And this last ten minute break of the day

is when I finally empty my lunchbox and the thermos inside

and put the now lightweight container back on its shelf

and dive into the day's fourth quarter: only 110 minutes.

Also, 20 to 30 minutes before the end I stop

and push a broom around, or just fiddle with something

or maybe fill up various parts-trays with washers

and bolts, or talk to the partsman, climb out of my

coveralls, and genrally slack off.

Until the 4 p.m. hooter of hooters

when I dash to the timeclock, a little shoving and pushing

in line, and I'm done. Whew.

But even when I quit

the numbers of the minutes and hours from this shift

stick with me: I can look at a clock some morning

months afterwards, and see it is 20 minutes to 9

—that is, if I'm ever out of bed that early--

and the automatic computer in my head

starts to type out: 20 minutes to 9, that means

30 minutes to work after 9: you are

50 minutes from the break; 50 minutes

of work, and it is only morning, and it is only

Monday, you poor dumb bastard....

And that's how it goes, round the clock, until a new time

from another job bores its way into my brain.

Driving out of Southern Worcester County

say goodbye to small towns their boundaries cutting across the names of dead indians, trees still remembering that speech their shelved histories leaning on years of drought, of rain, lives the immigrant knows nothing of canadian, pole, latin root their lives on rock this earth won't give up their names the journey a word took changed but familiar, unaware of footsteps echoing years back in the forest their lives held like a cup, thin and intricate that could break with a sound like water falling or the sound of an animal running for shelter but strong with an old craft hard, and made to be passed on to their children or to tourists who look out from car windows bored, and unknowingly carry them off