Resigning from a Job in a Defense Industry

By Sandra McPherson b. 1943 Sandra McPherson

The names of things—sparks!

I ran on them like a component:

Henries, microhenries, Blue

Beavers, wee wee ductors:

Biographer of small lives,

Of a plug and his girl named Jack,

Of Utopian colonies which worked—

Steel, germanium, brass, aluminum,

Replaceables.

Outside, afloat, my words

Swung an arm charting the woman

Who was the river bottom.

We tried, beyond work, at work,

To keep what we loved. Near

Christmas I remember the office

Women trimming their desperately

Glittering holy day trees. And,

Just as I left, the company

Talent show, the oils and sentiment

Thick on still lifes and seacoasts,

The brush strokes tortured as a child’s

First script. Someone

Had studied driftwood; another man,

The spray of a wave, the mania

Of waters above torpedoes.

Sandra McPherson, “Resigning from a Job in the Defense Industry” from Elegies for the Hot Season (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). Copyright © 1983 by Sandra McPherson. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Elegies for the Hot Season (Indiana University Press, 1970)

Biography

Sandra McPherson weaves vivid images culled from nature into what Contemporary Women Poets contributor David Young characterizes as "rich, complex, and deeply satisfying poems." In collections that include the National Book Award-nominated The Year of Our Birth, 1988's At the Grave of Hazel Hall, and 1996's Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals, McPherson has increasingly honed her unsentimental, insightful verse, imbuing it with . . .

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