Sherry Fairchok
January 2004

A White Lampshade


Its crinkled plastic cover,
fussy and timid
as a rain bonnet, a shower cap,
made me laugh, humiliated again
by my family’s bad taste,
because I did not understand then
that to be born a woman in a mining town
was to inherit the unending war
against coal dust that men dug up all day
and wore home at night, like a farmer’s tan.

In spite of bathhouses at the breaker,
in spite of the bowl and pitcher on the front porch,
in spite of the claw-footed tub in the kitchen,
with the permanent black smudge
painted along its bottom by the water leaking out,
coal dust imbedded itself into every
chip and crack of their daily lives.

The men’s nails were rimmed with it,
their hair on the pillow gritty with it,
their laughter hoarse with it,
their skin stubbled by its five o’ clock shadow.
Its burning was the urinous odor they breathed,
in and out from their bodies, both awake and asleep.
Its grit grayed the shingles of their houses,
dulled the leaves of lilacs, eclipsed the globes
of tomatoes in backyard gardens,
peppered sheets left pinned on clothes lines.
No snow lay unsullied for long.
Cinders pocked the drifts, then heat from slag heaps
melted the rest, like enamel baking off radiators,
defeating even winter, that great whitener.
Against the perpetual drizzle of grit,
what were scrub brushes, mops, bluing, bleach,
pails and rain barrels and wells of water,
what were women’s hands
lathering, rinsing, ringing out rags?

The scrubbing never ended. Even in sleep,
their fingers curled as if they dreamed
of clutching a clean handkerchief
balled up underneath their pillows,
buried so deep nothing could dirty it.
And when the coal was all dug out,
the breaker rusted and collapsing,
the coughing, coughing,
phlegm-hawking husbands, fathers,
brothers, uncles all underneath for good,
when the Black Lung Benefit check came,
the widows of my family paid for
the whitest front parlor they could afford,
so creamy, so glacial, it cast no shadows:
white carpet, white walls, white sofa,
white lampshade, pristine under plastic.

from The Palace of Ashes, CavanKerry Press, 2002.