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.