The White Flywheel

A new concrete engine hall among cornfields in Iowa on a frosty March morning, pale sunlight through tall many-paned windows onto light green walls and a yellow crane girder, a tall grey upright diesel engine with a platform, a yellow railing and a steel ladder, beside it a large white flywheel with a red rim and a turquoise generator with open winding slots, every casting plain and unmarked, at the back a grey switchboard with round instruments with blank pale faces, beyond the windows frozen corn stubble and wooden poles running into the fields, a machinist in denim overalls seen from directly behind, face turned fully away.