artwork: ralph murre
In the First Years
by
Donna Hilbert
I
don’t know exactly what he does all day,
my
fresh-pressed engineer
how
his slide-rule calculates
movement
buried in the passageways
of
pipes and tanks.
He
uses words like
volatile, effluent, pressure.
But,
I know what I do
rumpled
mommy of two,
in
a neighborhood so strange
I
think it dangerous to stroll them to the park
alone.
Mostly, I stay home
and
wash piles of laundry
I
never sort or fold,
cook
food that doesn’t taste quite right,
although
I won’t admit
nothing’s
ever really good.
Sometimes
I drive him to work
when
I want the car to visit
my
mother in the valley.
The
refinery air is sulfurous
and
thick, it makes the babies
in
the back-seat gag, get sick,
vomit
with such force they splatter my back
with
flecks of puke, so I never
come
entirely clean.
We
go back after dusk
to
pick him up.
The
air still stinks, but the tanks
light
up like Christmas.
In
a couple of years the plant explodes
leaving
a co-worker dead.
And,
I will throw a plate of spaghetti
a
whisper from my husband’s head.
But
in the first years, no notion
of
what comes after—
the
fragile welds that held us
a
match strike from disaster.
~
first published in 5 A.M.
