Mill Girls

Mill No. 4
Greenville, NH

Mill Girls: A Sense of Direction

When they shook the box, and poured out its chances,

you were appointed to be happy.  Even in a prison

they would give you the good cell…

                                                                                William Stafford

                                                                                For a Daughter Gone Away

Yesterday.  I should write about yesterday.  Because the sun

could be seen coming up and I walked out into it and watched it

rise over the old mill brick and continue as if nothing

below ever happened ever enough to please it into being still.

And it’s true, it never will be still, even in the picture of it up

through the hole in the floor of the iron fire escape—

the fancy grillwork on the face (south?) of the building

where feet once, must’ve, at least in some drill, walked on

and down and out the hell out of the booming, the looms, the move-

ment illusive as silverfish on the floor of hundreds, hundreds of feet

even if they’re the same feet, day after day after day

sun or rain whatever they’re making and ladies waving

it all away once the day's quit of itself and they make the end

a place up on the hill beneath the rock quarried not far off, not far

at all from the fire escape from the water falling over the mill

dam where maybe and I’ve wondered this before they may have lost

their one shot getting out and falling pregnant they watch the spot

on the rock where once in the dark of it all felt so good

the water spray the way the funk would come up off the bottom

and if it didn’t couple and settle on their near naked bodies at first

eventually because they would take to it in the end have pretty

children and make them educated enough to read to figure to pray

and maybe when the mill closed for good because they knew it would

there’d be something else for them to step into and it would hold them

while they walked inside the wall the held railing vibration in the bolts
of the star anchors in the brick running true through the whole floor to floor

bottom all the way to the roof where if the loom girls were let off

early on the night of a near full moon and they’d loose their girdles they’d lose

their fear of falling off the face of the earth and risk climbing and watch

it while it moved while it stood still while it walked or seemed to

between them each and then inside, still rising still just this side

(but then it’s just like any other kind of dying) rising.