A Dead Weight Of Lightness

the aluminium


Around 1970 it was...
the aluminium won on balance...
click-lock new pipes for the modern spray line
had to be compared
with the dead-weights of rust-poxed iron gal.
Shiny silver,
Aluminium pipes came up so light
you nearly fell over backwards to lift them.

As the aluminium arrived we each had to be
a pivot for all that surprising absence of weight,
turning the lightness like a balance beam,
raising lengths, as if gifted Hercules.

Strong! Pipe was so light you could injure
yourself with the old human strain.
Some strongmen put their back out
with a hefty clean and jerk.

Us boys lifted the two-inch easy,
simple as a tightrope walkers' beam. And balanced
them as if extruded tubes plumbed a line of truth.
Those great lengths in that broad diameter weighed so little.
We loved to demonstrate this wonder. Even with his casual talk
of pentecostal gifts granted, Dad’s new-shod boyish smiles
showed metallurgent science was more our miracle.

What looked to be heavy, wasn't.
What seemed weighty, came up light.
What seemed hard, came near too easy!

None among us even roundly guessed
the three-inch pipe could be so light,
then crush when runover, until well we knew.

Hopeful of the new world we lived, we then played
these aluminium scales on balance with no sense of parody;
Uncle Sam gave our free-world the Statue of Liberty herself.

We believed in the American dream of who we could be.
We were a moveable fulcrum to the shifting pipes
as if we could conduit that light wonder into ourselves.

The Aluminium came mint-new into the seventies,
And I can see us, as we were circa Seven-0
with the Iron Curtain of tanks still haunting Europe,
lifting pipes in this credulous miracle, as if against gravity.

Weighing a world in that balance,
it seemed a balance of power shifted
the old iron world seemed to be passe',
without grace. Who wanted that weight?

As though this free world was a source of grace,
we threw off care, let go big wanting for
that old yoke to be easy, longing to say like the sprinkler sprays:
'I want, I want, my burden to be light.'

But then, even shiny pipes had to be moved
- every shift - trailers and carrier utes built to
transport what-seemed to be light-years of pipe around,
-and driving duly hooked us teenage boys in-

all summer long in the greasy burden of elbows,
tee-pieces, end plugs, reducers, being a pipe short.
Let alone wind changes which left half a land dry and begging
a drink, so that the whole line had to be moved again.

Was it Napoletano?, the migrant peasant named
for his native Naples, who got caught out.
He farmed the creeky little strawberry place
down below our old primary school.

He was shifting into the freeworld as a spray line
out in the middle of his Australian paddock, when because
you could - or for no reason at all -except to enjoy the sheer lightness
that old iron never had, he raised the aluminium
pipe end for end, - and they were tall as masts-

and as the metal went over the vertical
it struck the forgotten
high voltage power lines which took
a surge to earth down the pipe
through him, and,
as if to aluminiumise the idea
of lightness, something went out of him...
left him a dead weight.

Wayne D Knoll