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Gary Geddes has written and edited more than 35 books and won a dozen national and international literary awards. "Ladies and Escorts" is from a forthcoming collection of poems called Falsework. He served as Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University 1998-2001.
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Published Spring 2007
 
Ladies & Escorts
I walked off a job in Castlegar
for safety reasons. Dismantling steel
is what we'd been doing, temporary
structures, so late in the day
you couldn't see bugger-all. I wanted
to quit. The foreman, gung-ho,
insisted there was plenty of light
to finish the job. Hundred and eighty feet
to the river. Couldn't swim a stroke.
We kept several bolts in place,
inserted a couple of pins to knock
out as the choker tightened
and the crane took up the weight.
Nobody calculated the wind-factor.
About to pop pins, when the beam
leaned out over the river. A goner,
I thought, drowning in the pitch-
black, or flattened on rocks
first. I screamed at the foreman.
He was running towards the crane,
only the white dot of his hard-hat visible
below. Wind and weight had tilted
the rig thirty degrees. It tottered,
trying to make up its mind. No one
responded to my screams. Big pair
of lights. Auxilliary crane barrelled
downhill, hooked onto the other,
eased it back into position. Get up, Doyle,
the foreman shouted the next morning.
Fuck you, I quit. You can't do that,
it's not safe. It was less safe last night
when you almost got me killed. Only
other close call was in the beer parlour
of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown
Vancouver. I called Jim English
something nasty and his wife Ruby
came at me swinging. I can still feel
the wind as her punch went wide
of the mark. Decked me,
she would have. So help me, Jesus,
high steel is dangerous work.
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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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