The Press Run

Choose two cans of ink, and explore them
for the soft caramel of good set, putting aside
flakes of air-dried dross with the inking knife.
One, a can of orange stuff, you've been given
for imprinting brew-pub six-packs; the knife
scoops up a dollop and ferries it to the disk.
The other is your standard black; the smallest
bubble of this add to the orange, and stir
in hopes of a decent brown. A heave of the flywheel
begins the inking-up: the disk turns a bit
with each revolution of the wheel, and the ink,
smashed paper-thin by the rollers, spreads evenly
across its face, painting it, painting the rollers,
as your foot pumps the treadle, and your face
admires, as it always does, the view from here,
of garden dressed in straw, of mountain air
training the rainbow windsock northward,
of Jasper Mountain becoming Gold Mountain
in the sunset. Gathering the furniture, reglets,
quoins, quoin key, and the new magnesium cut,
you lock the chase, fasten it to the bed, turn
the press, this time with impression lever on,
and let the cut kiss the clean tympan paper
with an image. Around this image place quads,
tympan bales, and bits of makeready, and prepare
the stacked sheets to be fed from the feed board
into the maw of the Chandler & Price, known
to pressmen for a hundred fifty years as the
Hand Snapper. Reach for the radio's knob.
Rachmaninoff? Oh, well, turn the wheel, pump
the treadle, lean forward, lean back,
click-click, click CLACK, work-and-turn,
deliver the finished sheets to the delivery board,
admire the mountain, lean forward, lean back.
Rachmaninoff gives way to Mozart's glorious
forty-first symphony, and Jasper Mountain
gives way to night, and in the black window
a man in his late forties, leaning forward,
leaning back, critically appraises the music,
the printing, and you, click-click, click CLACK,
sour bones and a game leg but the job's well done
and the Mozart is Mozart. Four hundred sheets
later, and well into Bruch, the wheel stops,
the chase is unclamped, the disk and rollers
washed up, and rags canned. The greybeard
in the windowsheen lifts a sheet of work
to the light, examines impression and matter.
Reaching together to silence Bruch
and the buzzing worklamp, you and he
become one again, and the window becomes
only a window. By starlight you can see the
stilling silhouette of the rainbow windsock:
it waits for dawn and a fair and lofting wind.