Steel Valley ~ Poems & Prose
by Michael Adams
Genre: Poetry &
Prose, Trade Paper
Publisher: Lummox Press (PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301)
www.lummoxpress.com
Pages: 144
ISBN:
Steel Valley can be purchased from
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Here are a few excerpts from the book...
Monongahela
The river itself, a slow brown ox,
harnessed to the yoke of industry,
was as common as my neighbors
and as of as little interest.
I carried with me in those days, before life touched me with failure
and some sympathy, the hard stone of intolerance that the young may bear
for the familiar, to mask their fear and uncertainty.
From the bluffs above Lock and Dam #2
I watched the tugs push their coal barges downriver,
imagined the days and nights of their long journeys,
past Pittsburgh, down the Ohio to the soft-banked Mississippi,
past all the towns with their wonderful sounding names --
Gallipolis, Oceola, Tallulah --
Dreamed of the bayous and salt-washed rivers,
sea-tangled with life --
ibises and spoonbills startling
the cypress swamps --
God's Son Lay Down
walked down East Colfax Ave. on a Jan. morning,
1AM, in the snow, torn
sneakers and an alto sax and nowhere
to rest his head, nowhere except
in the lap of an old junkie whore,
and God's son lay down his dark head there,
Lay down his head on the altar of flesh
weary of preaching love,
offering his music of love.
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lay down his head again to die
and be reborn with the new day, reborn to preach
his only commandment,
To love that old bum, that old drunk vet,
that old woman smelling of vomit
wanted to hear about love, only
about vengeance and sin,
And God's son lay down his weary head
with it's undying burden of sorrow,
which is no more or less than joy offered
and not taken, lay down
his weary head in a back alley in the snow
in the lap of an old whore
and blew softly, softly
to his Father, the prayer
of his music.
Sunnyside
Dolores and I drive the
winding blacktop that hugs Cement Creek, sunny May morning, coming down from
Gladstone and the Sunnyside Minrus skeleton in the Carnegie Museum in
Pittsburgh, read there about the Rocky Mountains and dreamed. Now, all these
years later, I find a Carnegie Library in Silverton.
How we are shaped by land and water, the work of a lifetime, nothing ever lost, Cement Creek, the Monongahela River, everything carried along --
Silverton mines quiet, sinking
by slow stages back into the earth,
Homestead mills gone to weeds
and failing memory.
and the homeless under the
salt-stained bridges and the rich criminals in their gated mansions and the
working mothers with their clapboard rowhouse children, and the low heartbreak
HOOOO of a tug pushing a train of coke barges as the pilot blows his horn coming
down from Pittsburgh. Back up now through the old green hill-steep valleys of
youth, the houses and long wooden stairs climbing the hills, past the scarred
coal towns and into the old rolling mountains of youth. Chestnut Ridge,
Allegheny Mountain, the rock-swift streams, the aching beauty of dogwood and
mountain laurel blossoms high on a stony ridge. And your heart, with its
yearning bigger than the years, and its dreams fulfilled or broken or still to
come, settling now as the train slows beneath the highways, a light rain
falling, switching past the graveyards of buses and the blank warehouses of late
night Denver, the weedy margins of train yards and the rain-black puddles of
gravel and weeds, and into Union Station, and you nudge your wife gently awake
and tell her, here we are.