I'm alone with the night again thinking every union, every right: the ghost of a failed general strike. The smoke laughs out of me against the night: every union, every right: the ghost of a failed general strike. My father taught me how to play poker next to the Murphy bed. After every deal, he said "the pot is right." Whose pot is right & why: the ghost of a failed general strike. In his metallic mauve Altima the Black & Mild's cut sharpie-sized holes in the tan leather interior. Every cigar, every car: the ghost of a failed general strike. His uncle kept a sawed off in his jacket "to keep the scabs in line." Summer '59, nationwide steel strike. Every empty steel mill I spelunked in -- drunk & under age, every warehouse empty like my pockets, every cavity in this city's foaming mouth, every inch of the continued occupation of this continent; the ghosts of a failed general strike, teeth, leather, bricks in the pavement, the river & its course, the speed at which a car becomes criminal, the color & quantity of my hair, the height & weight of my father & uncles, the percentage of the stars in the sky at night; the ghost of a failed general strike.
"The American poet, translator and essayist Jane Hirshfield engages with ecological crisis and its ramifications in this oblique and mysterious narrative....Like the ladder itself, the story and the very grammar it rests on are flimsily suspended. Gradually simple objects and clear sense impressions are translated into the surreality of nightmare."
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"What is a weed in one cultural context is medicine or food in another; what is invasive in one ecosystem is native to another; and plants, like matter, as William James would wisely say, have no ideals. What I brought to the Star Thistle was what Adam Phillips in his marvelous book Darwin’s Worms would call the problem of grieving in a secular age."
