Two Poems
David Stephenson

Carnegie Library

The public library in my home town was built

with money from the pious steel magnate

in 1903. It was three stories tall

with five fireplaces and an oak staircase.

I studied there in high school, during

the legacy years before the internet;

I thumbed through history and nonfiction books

and read sex scenes with practical detail

in novels upstairs, largely Greek to me.

Back then I was a village radical

with a vague sense rich people were bad

although I hadn’t actually met any,

but I learned from books that Carnegie

did not believe in leaving wealth to heirs

and paid taxes and gave the rest away,

most notably to build the fancy pile

of brick and stone in my remote home town

which meant so much to me. I saw that I

owed Carnegie and should cut him some slack,

my first brush with ambiguity

and shades of gray. I sometimes think him

whenever I see a long shelf full of books,

and of the messy details of the past

that make the world so difficult to grasp.

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David’s notes: “Before the internet, if you wanted to study, you couldn’t look things up online, so you had to go to a library. In high school, I studied at the main public library in my home town, a magnificent building funded in part by Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist. I have fond memories of it, and it gave me a soft spot for Carnegie, who was not the kind of guy I would normally like. Carnegie was to have a big influence on my life, since I worked both at U. S. Steel, a company founded by buying up and merging Carnegie Steel and its main rivals, and in the automotive business, which adopted many of his ideas on vertical integration. But most of all due to the library.“

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Man of Steel

I was in the steel business long ago,

rolling coils of autobody sheet

with special textured rollers, to impart

a finish which would yield a good paint job.

Our plant was a straight line of separate shops

which stretched from ore crushers and coke ovens

to the stately, smoke-wreathed open hearth

to slab casters which molded glowing chunks

of newborn steel, to hot mills which rolled plate,

to cold mills which reduced the plate to sheet,

to serpentine annealing furnaces,

and finally to our humble skin pass mill.

One day, as we were rolling right along,

there was a gap in coil deliveries

for hours, it seemed. We stood around like fools

until the system got in gear again.

We soon heard rumors that the cause had been

an accident up by the open hearth;

a gas pipe fitter, high up in the roof,

had slipped and dropped into the caster sprue

while they were pouring steel, and vaporized

in a brief hiss and telltale plume of mist.

The slab he went into had to be scrapped

for being out of spec for calcium.

A lot has changed since then. The plant is closed

but not torn down, just left to rust and rot,

the town, what’s left of it, has gone to seed,

and I’ve quit wasting time on memories;

but I still think about that man of steel

whose name I never heard, who fell that day

from this world to the next, and vanished in

a puff of smoke, and hardly left a trace.

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David’s notes: “I worked for U. S. Steel from 1981 till 1983. Their largest facility was Gary Works in Indiana, a huge mill on Lake Michigan that had docks for ore boats, steelmaking furnaces, and processing plants for sheet steel, I-beams, etc. I did some tests at the north sheet mill there and heard this story about a worker who had fallen into a caster and been vaporized a couple of years earlier. Years later, when I was working at General Motors, I ran into another U. S. Steel veteran who had worked at Gary. She filled in a lot of the details for me, which inspired me to write this poem. I think it’s largely accurate, although Gary had basic oxygen furnaces, which I changed to an open hearth to fit the meter.“

“‘Man of Steel’ originally appeared in the now defunct Umbrella in 2009, and is in my collection Wall of Sound.“

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David Stephenson is a retired manufacturing engineer from Detroit, and the editor of Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

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Two Poems David Stephenson

Two Poems
David Stephenson