Heather Swan

Inside the factory, fine black soot
coats the floors and the walls, and soon
our nostrils and tongues. Nothing
is small in this place where coal is cooked
for power. I’ve spent thirty-seven years
in here, Jerry says, as he guides us
over steel grate bridges four hundred feet
from the ground, and past the massive boilers
and dripping corroded pipes, and down
to the infernal fires. He hears
and smells anything going wrong, and
has risked worming his entire body
through narrow, searing tubes in order
to make repairs. I saw it was an act
of love. I thought of my mother, a potter,
also a tender of fires, who taught us to read
the colors of the flame in her kiln. She knew
when the fire was hungry and how to read
the smoke. He says they added scrubbers
to the chimneys once they knew what was
pouring out. The lines in his face are like
the map of a delta becoming more tangled
as things erode. No one told him
when he took this job he would be party
to any destruction. He just understood
when folks flipped switches in town,
and the lights came on, it was because
of the work he knew how to do.