I was able, always, to hear the morning and evening trains arrive and depart, and I used to set my watch by the whistle at the
brickyards.*
You see, it was like this: you know that fancy brickyard they're gettin' ready to start for makin' extra special fire brick for inside walls?
"Well, as I was sayin', I gave 'm the glad hand, an' trailed along with 'em to the brickyard, an' from the talk I could see things was doin'.
On one such week-end visit, Holdsworthy let him in on a good thing, a good little thing, a brickyard at Glen Ellen.
It was a good lesson, however, for he learned that there were few faiths in the business world, and that even the simple, homely faith of breaking bread and eating salt counted for little in the face of a worthless brickyard and fifty thousand dollars in cash.
There was no
brickyard in the town, and in addition to our own needs there was a demand for bricks in the general market.
Beyond this dump there stood a great
brickyard, with smoking chimneys.
You see, the alpenstock is his trophy; his name is burned upon it; and if he has climbed a hill, or jumped a brook, or traversed a
brickyard with it, he has the names of those places burned upon it, too.
Close beside it one descried the quadrilateral enclosure of the fair of Saint- Germain, where the market is situated to-day; then the abbot's pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with a leaden cone; the
brickyard was further on, and the Rue du Four, which led to the common bakehouse, and the mill on its hillock, and the lazar house, a tiny house, isolated and half seen.
Most of Michigan's
brickyards that once produced cream-colored bricks have faded into obscurity, but a few stand out because of the fame of the beautiful structures they helped to create.
Former brick maker John Cooksey has been researching and writing about the history of fire brick making in England's Black Country for the past 40 years to produce his labour of love, the recently published '
Brickyards of the Black Country - a Forgotten Industry'.
"what certainty / in the body at its end?/And between here and there?" His diction is direct and clear and his poems are filled with concrete details that ring true and familiar, "green clabber I scumming puddles alongside the train, / then
brickyards banked on body shops, / homeless trackside nappers under trees,/ ditchwater where shopping carts come to drink..." Yet Di Piero himself is always wary, slightly skeptical of the material world, consistently being pulled toward some "uncertainty where/I feel most at home...."
brickyard - a place where bricks are made and sold