72
PARTISAN REVIEW
I didn't discover Simone Weil through Czeslaw Mi!osz, but I've
been greatly heartened by his admiration for her, and I admire his essay
about her philosophy. Since I've been reading her philosophy I've been
deeply influenced by it and also carryon a quarrel with it. But I love
her notion that attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul. Anyway,
my poem is about the year she worked in a factory.
In
my poem there
are several quotations from her essay "The Mysticism of Work." She
says, "To work in order to eat, to eat in order to work," and, "Through
work, man turns himself into matter, as Christ does through the
Eucharist. Work is like a death; we have to pass through death, we have
to be killed." "Simone Wei!: The Year of Factory Work, 1934-1935."
A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.
She looks down at the cabbage on her plate,
She stares at the broken bread. Proposi tion:
The irreducible slavery of workers. "To work
In order to eat, to eat in order to work."
She thinks of the punchclock in her chest,
Of night deepening in the bindweed and crabgrass,
In the vapors and atoms, in the factory
Where a steel vise presses against her temples
Ten hours per day. She doesn't eat.
She doesn't sleep. She almost doesn't think
Now that she has brushed against the bruised
Arm of oblivion and tasted the blood, now
That the furnace has labelled her skin
And branded her forehead like a Roman slave's.
Surely God comes to the cl umsy and inefficient,
To welders in dark spectacles, and unskilled
Workers who spend their allotment of days
Pulling red-hot metal bobbins fi'om the flames.
Surely God appears to the shattered and anonymous,
To the humiliated and amicted.
