The Workhorse Section

Just before the transport capsized she gave me a ring in two parts. Her coat stained heavy with residual slag.

Much later: checking the prints amassed on the band's circumference I find a great deal of reference to her past. A nauseous pause trips these investigations, imagining her hips sunk below us. Kettle-lice jetting through clothespegs.

A ring in two parts hangs from the monitor, a screen displaying records of her crimes and a boy kneeling in the mud outside an old station. Eyes dim as he makes his discovery. In the ground another sign of her labour, another heavy relic thieved from industry, a monstrous ingot chained in dirt and gravels. Listening to its weight he hears machinery. A ring in two parts maintains our distance.

He follows the soot, the tracks, to the station, its broken roof blackened by coke deposits (choked rain). A horny crow pocks holes in the sheet-metal.

And I have never been insensitive to a nostalgia for crumpled industry. My mother. She'd haul sleepers in the night to break paths for her children; building vagabond railroads until that final collapse. Tyres with the burst running out of them. Purse of tears when she fell into the steam.

One day I saw my mother clearly. She stood like a little girl, one foot hooked over the back of the other. She looked very tired.

All the trinkets she handed down to me. Opalescent fears. The stink of empire. A little carved box full of delicate resentment. The garnet of betrayal.

Hidden behind an emptied language, that swallowed girl.

My mother's envious eye. My mother's knife, blue in the bombshelters. My mother's tiny hands.

What fable of redemption rattles through those paranoid phylacteries?

Love as privation. Power's panicked maintenance. The baroque aristocracies of blame. Time uselessly sifting through a frozen drawing room. Martyrdoms of teeth.

A faecal madness hunting through the gloom. All those blank daughters.