Nightshift passes like a drunk.
A man hoists trays of heavy molds
onto a shelf and groans. He lifts
all night, all night he groans. A spotter
pushes a giant magnet through the air
and signals the craneman, just so,
to release a ton of steel
upon two skinny rails
that bend, then hold. The spotter wails
in celebration or in curse—who knows?—
into the midnight caverns of the plant.
I watch the slinger crew conclude
their awkward dance. Low-man cleans up.
He pushes the leftover sand
(so harsh to breathe) into piles
then through a pit on to a ceaseless belt.

Too tired to make small talk,
my partner tells me how two young guys died—
brothers, they were pouring on the wheel,
when one guy dropped his ladle
on the ground below. He passed out
from the heat into the ankle-deep spill.
His brother stepped in, started to go down . . .
My partner's voice trails off
in the fluorescent buzz of the lunchroom,
but I see them, two boys splashing
in a pond of yellow steel,
until the wheel crew pulls them out.
The burn unit wrapped them in someone else's skin
for two days, when their lungs gave out.

All men look like devils
in the furnace light. The furnace tender
was a sorcerer as well
with me as his apprentice, stumbling
around the ten-ton room that holds the light.

I don't remember the sorcerer's name
but he left the Pima reservation
when the mines shut down, and loved to play softball
even in a Phoenix summer. He nails a short branch
on a twenty-foot trunk of tree and gestures
for me to take hold of it. “There isn't much
to slagging a furnace . . . Be careful.”

And then the door opens,
and the lake seems to lean toward me
bright yellow in the visor-green.
I run the tree into the glowing center
and skim the golden coals of slag
from the sizzling waves, back and forth,
like raking a lawn. “Good enough!”
my partner hits my shoulder, “Come on!”

Once in the parking lot, we wake up
from the nightmare-hours to the red sun
rising through palm trees in a little park.
A thin mist wreaths the paddle boats
and shabby dock of the duck pond.
Behind us, the foundry smokes and shrieks.

We slump over our beers, gray as ghosts,
and wonder where we'll be next year.
Most will get better jobs, and some (like me)
get hurt. But if you're tough enough to stick it out
you'll get laid off when the plant shuts down.
We see the future, each and every ghost.

Then I drive home up Baseline Avenue
past the Japanese flower farms
crowding the new air with acres of petals.

I try to shut the light out of the house
and pull the sheets over my skin,
glad that it's cool enough to sleep.
I think about a tree, the tamarack,
that never burns.
I skim it over sizzling waves
and reach into the lake of yellow steel.

Hours later, the afternoon light
splashes me awake. We are not ghosts!
We fight to break the spell!