Page:Smoke and steel.djvu/23

Rh So ghosts hide in steel like heavy-armed men in mirrors. Peepers, skulkers—they shadow-dance in laughing tombs. They are always there and they never answer. One of them said: "I like my job, the company is good to me, America is a wonderful country." One: "Jesus, my bones ache; the company is a liar; this is a free country, like hell." One: "I got a girl, a peach; we save up and go on a farm and raise pigs and be the boss ourselves." And the others were roughneck singers a long ways from home. Look for them back of a steel vault door. They laugh at the cost. They lift the birdmen into the blue. It is steel a motor sings and zooms. In the subway plugs and drums, In the slow hydraulic drills, in gumbo or gravel, Under dynamo shafts in the webs of armature spiders. They shadow-dance and laugh at the cost.

The ovens light a red dome. Spools of fire wind and wind. Quadrangles of crimson sputter. The lashes of dying maroon let down. Fire and wind wash out the slag. the slag gets washed in fire and wind.