On the probation of coal Those muddy embargoes that precede the steam heating of public houses, monthly farrowing interest in the straw,

collect appreciations like overdue accounts. The faces narrow to a needle vein, a grimace that clings to pickaxe and pole,

limed carcase among the rotting soils: hollow galleries ease down their rails. The voiceless deaf cannot inherit

a lattice of roses steadying the estate or houses sulking into gardens and gardenias. Fires in the counting room

warm the cloisters’ symptomatic dissolution, diseases like the charms of penitence scattering text through basement and bonfire.

The old works’ low combustion heats young ladies from their paragraphs and gentlemen stringing houses up on swinish mortgages, obscene instruments to boil hair from grimy bodies. Elsewhere the market of routine requires

spring cabbage or onion edging the formal maze, the rootled nodules of potatoes, pasteboard tickets to a local terminus.

Blackberries gather their canes near wharves, the martial convenience of a native shore’s profusion of slag gardens or rank hills.

WILLIAM LOGAN