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David Salner worked as an iron ore miner in northern Minnesota. His third collection, John Henry's Partner Speaks, appeared in 2006.
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Published Fall 2006
 
Summer Words
0n the Iron Range, with Plutarch, a co-worker, and Bob Dylan
The first time I got laid off
from U.S. Steel, I went into the woods
with Brian, who had a chain saw
and a couple of acres of spruce to stump.
Each morning he pulled up in his Monte Carlo,
which he could no longer pay for, and I hopped in
with my thermos. Brian gunned it
and we slid over the icy ruts of town
into the woods. It was like entering the mines
on day-shift, but instead of the mills
banked nine stories high—the towering trees!
Brian's saw worked a wedge on one side,
and then he pushed the great trunk from the other
until a hundred feet of spruce
balanced above us, looked down. Soon it would crash
and I'd start limbing—the branches
exploding like crystal in the surly air.
We'd pile a couple of stacks and take a break
to pull our sweat shirts off, soaked through
from the work. In Northern Minnesota
the work will get you quicker than the cold
which is, as Plutarch said, so serious
that words congeal as soon as they are spoken.
Those are the kind of words we shared
on the Iron Range. Frozen words.
We burned a cigarette and watched the mist
curl from a fist-sized thermos cup.
**
After my second layoff, I got a job
stitching hospital pads for minimum wage.
An old timer saw me walking through the town
I lived in, and his jaw dropped
at the sight of a lunch pail.
"Oh, you got a job—that's good!"
**
In North Country Blues, Bob Dylan sings about
the red ore mines shutting down. When I got there
the ore was gray, called taconite, but at one time
dirt and dust were red
and smelled of the blood of immigrant miners.
**
Brian sold the wood we cut, joined the National Guard,
and drank a lot.
One day he came to the bar I used to frequent,
and we talked—not the hard words,
the frozen words that we'd grown up with,
but the words that Plutarch meant
when he said one day they would thaw out
and become the words you need.
For hours, we spoke those summer words. |
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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