Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The elegant women at their stations
in t-shirts and jeans
are cool
and aloof.
The youngmen who step
into the huge injection molds
are curious and friendly, their regard
direct and dreamy.
The guide shows the painter and the poet
glassy plastic parts of cars, she guides them through
the paint kitchen. Rivera studies angles
and cubes as the hanging racks move past
on belts of chains.
The behemoth machines hiss and shunt.
The hoppers are full of bright beads of many colored
    material
ready to be hoovered and heated and shot
into many molds.
Rivera secretly passes out union cards, stealthily
    distributes
IWW tracts while he appreciates the length of the
    women’s arms
as they yank headlights and window dividers from
    the jaws of the open molds,
shave the waste with glinting knives and place the
    parts on their racks:
a fluid ballet, practiced, no pretense,
just get the pieces out and hope the hours push on.

Rivera confers with Whitman
in a spotless room where parts that must remain
    dustless
are coated and cleaned. Whitman
brings apples. He slips a package of crackers and
    cheese
into a youngman’s pocket. He examines the belts that
    drop
whole racks of plastic pieces into tubs
full of thick primer and then into tubs of enamel.
They rise and drip; a reflection of Walt’s face
in each one. He twists his mustache. Not bad
for an old man. He urges Diego into a snapshot, a
polaroid, both of them there on the noisy floor.
Whitman brings the workers around them for the
    shot.
They can barely speak for smiling.

Rivera kisses a cool young machine operator.
Whitman lets his hand linger in the small
of one youngman’s back. Everything moves
around them: lights and belts and racks and parts.
Even the sun, the day, shuffles on hot and strong
through the wide windows of the lunch room
where bags and cans are opened, chicken and
    bologna,
coffee and pop stirred and sipped and crinkled and
chewed. Whitman passes out dates and figs, wants
    to kiss
the second shift foreman
on the lips. Rivera knows the power
of all those cubes in cubes in cubes suddenly shot
against the flash of an eternal sky

and the wind and the tree seeds that settle
dust over everything.