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Poet: Paola Corso
The
Corso in me had to ask my father when he was dying of cancer about his course in
life, his way to salvation. He told me it was a walk along the river, past the
school where he dago flunked until he learned the speak, the steel mill where he
operated a sweatbox crane, then to war to gun a fighter plane. The university to
skin a couple of degrees and home again. To the office where he showed his old
teachers this dago had learned how to write his name when he signed their
paychecks. A 76-year-old man who was determined to lick his cancer and get back
to work.
I
revisit my father's course and the course of his river town in my poetry
collection, Death by Renaissance—the treatments he endured to try to
prolong his life and the development schemes from gambling to prisons to
chain-store malls to tourism to jumpstart dying economies not just in Pittsburgh
but all across the country. I wonder how these blue-collar towns can be revived
so that the community purpose on which they were founded and the history that
once gave them life aren’t laid to rest in the process. Not that I want to
romanticize Pittsburgh’s steel industry. I
simply employ "the power of memory and the poetics of witness,"
to quote working-class studies author Janet Zandy. I write as one who left for
those who stayed.
In
the poem "The Same Fish Twice," I navigate the course of development
and its consequences in Pittsburgh river towns, particularly the human toll
exacted on a vanishing blue-collar class and the environmental degradation from
industry. Can what was done be undone? Is there a recourse? I turn to river
imagery here and throughout the collection because the river is Pittsburgh’s
sanguine gift of motion. It moved me to write this poem in a current. The flow
was its own, not mine.
But
the facts are ours: a city in the early '80s whose manufacturing sector lost
nearly 80,000 jobs, whose suicide rate was twice the national average. Divorces
were up. So was domestic violence. Unemployment and underemployment were
at 20 percent. Pittsburghers who never ventured beyond their corner bar
left family behind to find work in other parts of the country. It was as if
someone pried open their mouths, reached down their throats as they swallowed
the same fish they had been eating for generations, and yanked it out.
Pittsburgh's
rivers ranked among the most polluted in the country, its industrial waste dumps
among the most toxic. One was in my backyard in the woods along the river where
I swam, the trees I hid behind to play strip poker. They were leveled and
suddenly I was naked.
Perhaps
it's easy for me to ask these questions because I no longer live in Pittsburgh
and I pose them in the safe haven of poetry where I'm only vulnerable as a
writer—not like the Pittsburghers who have no work clothes to wear. Yet every
time I visited in the past year, I agonized over
having to leave my dying father. Now I have the same ambivalence over his dying
river town. Is my course its recourse? Will I have a second chance to give it
new life, and it me? I write about what it would be like to swim in my cove
again, rocked and swaddled, brown at the edge of green. My head bobs the eyeful
water, light enough to begin again.
The
Same Fish Twice
1.
Renascence,
what
naval sky we follow to eye
the forest, what corded sound we
murmur to ax
the trees, how warmly we dress in lining unbroken
to log the timbered cabin, to unpack the covered wagon,
why we suck our thumbs while reaching inside,
pulling the pail to fish the river, to fry the trout;
(baby, baby, you’re out).
2.
Progress,
what it weighs when we set it on the plate
to feed our neighbor, what it pays
to lick it clean,
bones thrown in fiery steel, how much to ash the beam,
how high we count on our fingers and toes to span the bridge
for walking, how far across yet miss the inevitable stop,
strides beyond,)
(limping back,
wind beating inside our ear through
cleft mats of hair
and
blowing holes through our underwear.
3.
Appearance,
what polka-dotted line we sign to open
our neighbor’s mouth, just how to
unswallow the neighborly
fish, what apron to wear to unfry the trouted dish
to pail it back into the river, to repack into the wagon
before razing the cabin, digging, digging below
puddles of lace to plant the log, to thicken the forest
(too dark to grow, too much to weed.)
Paola
Corso
This
poem originally appeared in Italian Americana Winter 2004 and was later
published in Death by Renaissance.
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