Misfortune’s Wheel

How still the millpond, how shallow-sweet the weedy water

and its flitting flies, its green weep of foliage!

And look- this great curved cage, 

these noble stanchions,

this ruthless rouser of wet revolutions …

the venerable waterwheel

which for centuries 

has coursed its wooden way 

to grind corn

and heroins

for the hungry mouth 

and fluttering hearts of  humankind.

Heroines?  

Look closely-isn’t there something

horrid about the thing,

something ancient and torturous,

a watery Catherine wheel?

Ra-ther!  Most so.

 

And most certainly a hundred

ladies of breeding have fallen foul of the thing.

Victorian novels were greatly drawn to waterwheels.

If the heroine was not mortally immersed in the still, 

cold glass of the millpond,

then she got caught in that thrashing wheel, 

got mangled and bloodied, mashed and drowned.

Or even worse, got lashed to it

by the vile-whiskered villainous miller 

for not paying her bill of dishonor.

Thereafter the weeds yearned with their flowing tongues to lick her body,

which floated, for all eyes the better to see,  neatly upon its back.

The biggest waterwheel in the world,

one reads, is at Laxey on the Isle of Man,

though no more is it touched by man’s hand. 

There are strange waterwheels

to launder gold-dusty tailings.

Syrian Hama is famous for its multiple wheels

raising water from the Orontes

to irrigate fields and gardens above; 

once there were thirty, now there are only a few.

My own favorite wheel is in the

Seine at Marly-la-Machine,

 near Bougival and the

Impressionists’ Grenouillere. 

The original wheel raised water to an aqueduct  

to feed the gardens of Versailles,

and the disappeared Chateau de Marly. 

The present immense iron contraption, high as a house, dates from 1859. 

It looks like something dropped from a giant paddle steamer,

one of those great iron paddle wheels wherein not heroines

but usually heroes got mashed in the stormier railway bookstall novels . . .

but we’ve wheeled full circle, isn’t this where we came in?

Later...