Factory Time

by Charles Cantrell

We blended ingredients
for cornmeal mix. While reading
Crane at lunch, I wondered,
when he leaped from the Orizaba
and waved, Goodbye, everybody,
was that a joke he didn’t swim back from?

I got fired for being late from lunch
too many times. Got a new job
at a doll factory, gluing hair
to scalps. I still enjoyed Crane
at lunch. His puzzling images
still excited me — like Where icy
and bright dungeons lift swimmers
their lost morning eyes.

Walking home one night, I passed
a pile of junked doll parts: broken arms,
over–glued scalps, drilled–wrong eye sockets.
Does the world mutilate us,
or do we mutilate the world?