Something about those smokestacks -- redolent of sulfur, like underworld throats
reaching skyward, flames flagging the air.
Driving through Gary, Indiana, he must have thought: dragon's lair, or steam of large
vessels setting out to sea, the chug of men working to pull or push
     something into being.

When two elements meet: fire and smelt,
                                       smelt and air,
                                       one either crushes or carries the other.

Perhaps he remembers his brother, caked in black, a glove of mud reaching up
     from under the cat walk through the crack in boards, three fingers
     that striped his white ankle then disappeared.
Below him, the marsh whispered, a viridian prison. He could not believe that his
brother
     could or would submerge himself in the brack-water that smelled
     like a rotting refrigerator. His mind had not yet clamped down on the familiar --
The way he could stare into the pooled water of the marsh and imagine arms,
     something unnamable caught at the back of his throat.

And now, this moment held over him always-- the way you can be pinned, knees
     on shoulders as a string of spit spools into your squeezed face. That moment:
     fainting before mom and everybody!
     dropping the canoe oar into reeds, head hitting handrail as his body slumped.
In the morning, the gash on his forehead had shrunk to a red teardrop, and his brother
     teasing him again, called him Indian woman, dancing
     from foot to foot, why don’t you do a belly dance?
Now recently: a ten-car pile-up with six eighteen-wheelers. 2am and a slip of thick
     fog between the mountains. One moment movement, the next
     he’s facing wet pavement, the smell of burning oil, laytex
And glass like a pile of crushed ice. Down the highway, a paint truck had exploded
     and cattle, half singed, splattered with rainbow colors
     zagged out of the fog with eyes like round mirrors, and his boss on the phone
Hours later telling him take the rest of the week off. And then the insistent howl
     of the empty trailer along I-80 towards the Sky Way, towards
     the center of Gary, Chicago, the center of something.
Driving into Gary, he saw the bright, white-blue lights strung from cranes, the clouds
     that tether smokestacks and smokestacks that tether clouds
     until the whole city roils in smoke that churns dense and low
                                                                                            through the streets

Like a bad dinner conversation: rows of unhappy plates and the tongue that moves
     too slowly in your mouth, a muscle grown cold.