Samples of Page Dougherty's Poetry
Man's Life
Down the drift mouth, passing through
dark lips into the blacker veins
of coal, they light the world then
with what emanates from their own heads.
The long shift is broken only by coffee stops
or the failure of equipment,
and the crouched lunch circle
where out of dinner buckets they draw
double bologna sandwiches, chips,
dented fruit. Even Persephone
may not have picked such a pear.
And always, the plastic halfpints of water.
The darkly specked faces work
rest into hunger, talk into silence.
The body itself is burden
stomach mauled through the tunnels of rock,
comfort begged through antacid pills.
If a preacher works the shift,
some men will undo their safety hats to pray,
fearful of the world to which their lights now aim
and praise the abstracted realm above,
above the creeks and roads
and what remains of company towns.
At times there's talk of women.
One man spits the churl of his snuff
--women on evening shift,
where women go to squat to piss,
their monthly crabby backtalk,
the bad luck of it.
But since the earth is woman,
this city within the body of the earth,
and as they cling to being men,
relations of the sexes in the lower depths
rise troubling and oblique:
the miner who shot his wife and kids,
then took his own life with the rifle,
the ungovernable woman who quit her man,
how he moved to rule her sister.
Men at the Monongahela mine chiseled
peek-holes to see women showering.
Fossils, sleeping in the nooks of slate,
flowered and spiny scales of plants,
unburnable ganglia and tubes of the body--
give nothing up without a curse.
House
Far above the wage-work of coal
each woman cooks and cleans her discrete rooms
in trailers, double-wides, or company tracts,
Logan, Cora, Bim, Montcoal, Uneeda.
Each leans a while on the porch rail, watching
cars pass--men bundling home from hoot owl,
old couples driving from town, breathless,
trunks packed with canned goods from the food-stamp lode,
or counts the ones who've moved away to mills,
to candy factories, bars, coat hanger plants,
or graveyard digging to house the mixed-state dead.
She stokes the coal stove, scolds the cat again.
then to wash, or catch the soaps, until
the kids and lonely man return, all seeking dinner.