Clamor

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.