A slant-windowed belt-footed enormously long-boomed

Digger, dignified or at least designated as Lima-

That's a place in Peru. What is Lima doing here,

Clawing at Alewife Brook, to lay its water away

In five-foot-round adequate concrete tunnels?

The alewife, Indian for a sort of herring,

Maybe meaning aloof, swarmed up this stream.

They named it who netted a health here.

Bucyrus, a steam-shovel redder than two freight-cars,

Hero of tar-paper bunk-houses in the log-boom country,

A big-bucketted up-biter, grunting soft-coal smoke,

He jumbled boulders and raw fill into dinkey-trains

That hauled it through 1910 to build a dam.

In the Deerfield East Branch, fish were pike,

Perch, bass, mostly pike big and criminal,

The bass fiat the other way, a few lost trout.

Bucyrus worked three years to chew up enough Vermont

To dam a river. While he snored in the peeled-pine night

You there could stare at cold air. You could see the

Dead trees out in the water stood up for how hard it is

To kill fish, and get running water under control.

Bucyrus the whale, grounded and dry-mouthed,

Tried, and Lima, a diesel female and nervous,

Is trying, but the ancient stream runs, water

Is not to be buried, and the boulders will drift.