Among Ruins

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2008 by Gibb, Robert

Waterfront Shopping Complex

Former Homestead Works, U.S. Steel

I

Smokestack, 160-Inch Mill

Pillar, obelisk, mast.

It loomed beside the bridge

Since before I was born,

A minaret from which

They might have marked

The shifts. Steel-sheathed

And lined with brick.

20 feet wide at the base

They've imploded, a blow

Like a sledge, and then

The slow-motion buckle

And forward pitch-a last

Controlled blast, where

We'd dreamt of winds

Endless as the centuries,

The dead calm of masonry

Melville once traced in

The pyramids. As long

as earth endures, he wrote,

some vestige will remain.

Which is the way we'd

Thought about the mills:

Ruins like fabulous tombs.

"A last nail in the coffin

of something that died

15 years ago," a mill hunk

Complained. And Melville:

no moss as in other ruins

no grace of decay-no ivy

II

12,000-Ton Press

Scrolled and monumental, 40 feet high,

It stands in the lot behind Lowe's

Like something Mayan, cleared from the vines,

The housing sheared away,

The forging division, and the press shop.

What's left are the shafts of the double ram,

The entablature massive as a headdress.

And those 17 feet of base

A counterweight sunk beneath the blacktop.

Think of it: this out-compressed the planet

In pounds-per-square-inch, water oceanic

Through the surge tanks and pumps.

Stele and relic. Tool and die.

And now these words to remember it by.

ROBERT GIBB's latest book is World over Water (University of Arkansas, 2007). . . .