Glass: A Journal of Poetry Volume One Issue Two
Jugville, USA
Jugville, Michigan, 1999
It's Jugville for a pottery works
that once throve here.
Now fragments hint
at the thousands of crocks
made on this site and shipped
all over the Midwest, to be used
in dutiful kitchens and set in larders:
flour, molasses, oil, oats for porridge;
rye whisky secreted away.
In a yellowed photograph I see
the wooden factory, the kilns
with massive chimneys,
workers in shirtsleeves, in derby hats,
mustached, chewing on cigars, laboring
in a wilderness of crocks set out in rows,
ready for shipping, enough to store
an ocean of honey or beer.
Cotton to pad their wares, the men
load the new-fired receptacles carefully.
The horses steam and puff – loading
performed by those who,
like us, don't think they will ever die,
ever become a relic, ever join the clay
when the life breathed in goes out.