The Furnace Corridor

Lyrics

I take the path the heat has made.
Down from the landing, hand on the cold rail.
Past the Mechanical Room, where the house shows its bones, its copper veins sleeping.
I keep my eyes straight ahead.
No glance to the left, no thought for the Flood Room, for its silent, slick walls and the memory of cold.
My work is with the fire.
The air gets thick, gets tight. You can feel the door before you see the door. You can feel the heart before you hear the beat.

A turn of the iron handle and the corridor takes you.
It isn't long, but it's a world.
One bare bulb, swinging from a black wire, makes the shadows dance.
The bricks are warm to the touch, stained with a hundred years of coal dust.
And the sound... the low hum of the great iron heart at the end of the hall.
It’s a sound that has a taste. A velvet grit on the back of my tongue. I breathe it in. It's the only air there is down here.

Step and scrape.
Breathe the dust.
Lift and heave.
In iron, trust.
The floor is grit.
The air is thick.
The heart is slow.
Another brick of heat to throw.
Step and scrape.
The house inhales.
My shadow thrown.
On fiery trails.

This corridor is a long photograph of a single motion.
The man from 1928, his face is a smudge on the wall by the door, he’s walking with me.
His cough is in the air.
The boy from 1970, I see his thin shoulders in my own shadow as I lift the shovel.
We are all here.
We are all doing the same work.
The corridor holds the shape of our breathing, the echo of every shovel that ever struck this floor.

Sometimes the corridor is just ten feet of brick.
Sometimes it stretches into a tunnel of heat and work, and the furnace never gets any closer.
The walls are the inside of the drum, and my shovel is the beat.
The swinging light is the pendulum. The house is the clock.
And I am just the hand that winds it.
Again. And again. And again.

The last scoop slides home.
A soft metal ring as the shovel leans against the wall.
The iron door closes, but doesn't latch.
My footsteps fade.
The light keeps swinging.
The heart keeps beating.