Janice Miller Potter
1
Out-of-towners often wondered about the odd smell
lingering over the blackened valley. "It's the smell
of money," my cousin's grandfather would quip.
The smoke ran like water across the wooded hills
rising from the hollow of the Monongahela
fifty-seven years ago, a weather inversion having
forced down dense spumes of smoke and soot
from Donora's zinc and steel mills, back down
the throats of animals, humans, tomato patches,
steep acres of deciduous forests, gray in an hour.
Even so, the Saturday football game punted on,
high on a hill where the fans could see the plays
while down in the hollow people were gasping
for breath, choking, and vomiting up their blood
in houses hardly a stone's throw from the mills.
Before the weather lifted, they counted twenty
people dead. No one counted the grizzled dogs,
matted in wet smoke, red-tongued and stiffened
beside their chains. Or the links of burnt hillsides,
aerially photographed out of a morbid curiosity
but not for visceral evidence before a sootless court.
Oddly, the hills and that hollow have not disappeared
from the face of the earth. They are the earth now,
just a few miles from home, down the road skirting
the Monongahela, where we drove countless nights
after dark, slowly, mesmerized by the waterfire of coke
ovens, snaking along molten-orange river and skies.
2
Our boots kept wanting to meld into the muck
during one clearing late-autumn day, after a fretful
week of thunderstorms, decades after the devastation.
Foot-sore of resistance, we passed a moment
on a little knoll, looking back across the fields
bared for winter. With his usual concern,
my father's squint gathered in his nine cattle,
propped like roan miniatures on the opposite rise.
But I, an out-of-towner for a scatter of years,
could not perceive with his pastoral pleasure.
From where I stood, my view fastened onto
an invisible mine fire seaming under his land,
its smoke perpetually turning up a corner of field
by the hedgerow and the road, where the cattle
could, but never did seem to, trundle a cowpath.
Unlike me, he'd known the mills and coal mines
inside out, known the buried smell of his money
had gotten me away. When he'd caught his breath,
we trudged on, I absently watching his denim arm
fan arcs of winter ryeseed across the slant hillside,
the ovules catching onto his roughened hand,
leaving ochre flecks of husk and germ among deep
chapped crevices, bluish veins, and ashen hairs.
Whereas, according to deed, he was sole possessor
of these twenty surface acres, companies owned
all the underground, disaster-immune, in perpetuity.
How deep was his, I wondered. Six feet. One inch.
For exploitation, for the tragic remains, for his
buttonless sleeve, where is the hollow of lament?
Like a boy from a far-gone era, earning his nickel
peddling newspapers, he had slung a canvas sack
across his chest. From its quiver, he sowed handful
after handful of seed across his drabbled fields,
feeding them with winter nitrogen that, sooner
or later, would turn a blanket of bluegreen blades
for all the tears that had fed and gullied this land
down to a balding skull, flesh-thin, with grass.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Janis Miller Potter
Janice Miller Potter was born in southwestern Pennsylvania and now lives in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Connecticut and has taught at Rhode Island College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Connecticut Review, Ruah, Diner, Worcester Review, Words & Images, Aurorean, Off the Coast, Hidden Oak, Animus, Larcom Review, Dusty Dog, Goose River Anthology, Other Testaments, Best Poems 1986, Eire-Ireland, and Sakana. Her poem "Snapper" won Honorable Mention in the 2004 Friends of Acadia Poetry Competition.