The Mill at Pale

POEM By Chris Agee

His industrial stuff was prodigious, from Hungary and Serbia,
Italy, Germany and Switzerland, though not a lick in sight
of the Anglo-Saxon: chutes, vacuums, pumps,
filters, crushers, grinders, sorters, sifters, baggers.
It ranged from concrete pharaonic storerooms
to silken micron-meshes, like pinhead souls, within

immense wooden Swiss sieve-machines
that one push-of-the-hand could rock
buoyant as a cradle or boat suspended on itself
by its sidebar stabilizers, for which (he said)
only bamboo would do. The premises had been renovated
and downstairs was like a fairytale prison

of low arches and stuccoed vaults. Everything was heavy,
big, organized, dynamic, post-communist – a monster network
spanning three floors and onto the bays outside where
the trucks arrived with their orient wheat. Then the kitchens:
tiles, ovens, tray-racks, bread-moulds, woodpiles
for the stone-baked doughs. In total, forty employees;

but it was all for little or naught since no one now
wanted his bread in Sarajevo, and no one in Bosnia
thought of flour, or basic production, in a land
overrun by imports. Next door was his orchard
of new apple trees, their bright red fruit scarred
by worm-marks of no pesticides. The house itself was pure

wood beauty, with a wrap-around veranda and a stream behindgurgling pristine from the pine-clad hills. At the crossroads nearby, one of Tito’s ruined guesthouses, all turrets and follies, seemed an Austrian fantasia set down in the Balkans: each arched window a different size;
each framing arch, a window’s self-conscious perspectives.


Pale: a village near Sarajevo, where Radovan Karadzic had his headquarters during the Bosnian War.