Answer to Job

Have you kept watch beyond the skyline of blue fires
rippling from steel towers, squat brick chimneys
belching jetties of yellow smoke, the networks
of PVC pipe and signal lights, train tracks

and bridges, tug-boat docks and loading cranes?
Have you conjured kelp from the rivermouth, steelheads
to swim the canal’s still water, turtles to amble over car doors
and batteries? Have you towed horseshoe crabs in your wake,

the silvering over at evening, grey-backed wingspan of herons
landing, low-tide along the marshwort strand, rose-lit and blinking?
Where were you when I carted sleep through the kills?
When I rode horseback, did you canter up the river path

and circle the refinery? Have you shied at the lights
of chimney fires, reared up and been bridled? Can you
wake men when they’re strapped to your back like saddles?
Do you rust girders of Leviathan plants with rain you

drive from the sky, tide you draw up past sinking barges?
Who can stand before me? And who will wade the kills to jimmy
factory doors, start old assembly lines, who fix gutted
walls, caving roofs, when everything under the sky is mine?