Demurrage

At dawn the yardboss gave us
orders, another boxcar of cedar
or redwood or yellow pine or fir,
it never mattered, it had to be
unloaded, it was just a matter of
what shape it was in, sometimes the bands
held and the bunks were neat and tight and
it was just a matter of dancing with
the forklift. If the bands snapped or if
the cars were banged or shunted
and the lumber jammed and disheveled,
I crawled under the corrugated steel roof
and pried and levered and kicked the wood
free, sending it one plank at a time
out the side door onto rollers where it
shot out onto the truck and Bryan grabbed it
and dropped it with a slap onto the truck.
It was punishing work, the boxcars
retained the heat they collected across the west,
the steel seared my flesh and the air smelt of baked
bum shit and rotting vegetables scorched our lungs.
Those cars were clusterfucks, we fought them all day
with crowbars and hammers and chain saws
just to wedge free tons of wood jammed and pressed
against steel, at lunch we quenched our thirst
with cold beer and smoked weed just to fuck ourselves up
in the heat, then back to the boxcars and the
fucking wood and the yardboss would stop by
banging the steel door with a two-by-four telling us
to get the fucker unloaded, he had another two piled up
and the demurrage was killing him. By sundown
we’d get to the bottom of the car, unloading
20 foot planks and feed them onto the rollers
and we could sweep out the car and call it quits
when we’d check out the walls, read what
hieroglyphics or poems or epitaphs
or pentagrams were scrawled there
on the busted plywood and steel walls
by the bums and tramps and hobos and drifters
who inhabited these cars These were
inscrutable truths scratched out in chalk
and rust, shit and blood, we found them frightening,
like evil charms, oaths, curses on us, on anyone
who beheld those mysterious signs.
Stoned and spent, stupid from the heat,
we wanted more than our fear of the flattened
cans of peaches, the busted glass from their
Old Crow and the ashes from their fires,
we wanted another history, another story,
another tangle of events. Maybe
the next car would hold the key.