Clamor

Nick Norwood

The mill's non-stop noise, a whir and a clangor（叮当声）,

follows him home, over the bridge and up

the hill, while at his back it goes on wheezing,

chuffing lint through manifold（多方面的） windows,

into the village with the lunch bucket knocking

at his knee, to bounce a kid on his knee

in the sunlit parlor of the four-room cottage

identical to the one next door, beside

the river that powers the turbines. The privy's

sulfurous stench stretches to the porch while

his own open windows pass heat and flies

and rugrats flap through the sprung screen door.

A rung up from the tenant shack, maybe two

from a hovel on the Rhine, a hut on the Liffey,

the Mersey, the Volga, he is equal now

to the terrace-house bloke in Wigan,

to his next-century brother in Coimbatore,

or the one in a cinder-block flat in Nantong

perched above the Yangtze, whose mill tunes

its waters daily to the color it's dyeing --

red, blue, purple -- through a little trap door.