Haig & Haig behind the tool chest.
In Diderot’s Encyclopédie, an engraving
of a small machine shop: forge and bellows in back,
in the foreground a mandrel lathe turned by a boy.
It is late afternoon, and the copper light leaking in
from the street side of the shop just catches
his elbow, calf, shoe. Taverns begin to crowd
with workmen curling over their tankards,
still hearing in the rattle of carriages over cobblestone
the steady tap of the treadle,
the gasp and heave of the bellows.
The boy leaves the shop, cringing into the light,
and digs the grime from his fingernails, blue
from bruises. Walking home, he hears a clavier—
Couperin, maybe, a Bach toccata—from a window overhead.
Music, he thinks, the beautiful.
Tavern doors open. Voices. Grab and hustle of the street.
Cart wheels. The small room of his life. The darkening sky.
I listen to the clunk-and-slide of the milling machine,
Maudslay’s art of clarity and precision: sculpture of poppet,
saddle, jack screw, pawl, cone-pulley,
the fit and mesh of gears, tooth in groove like interlaced fingers.
I think of Mozart folding and unfolding his napkin
as the notes sound in his head. The new machinist sings Patsy Cline,
“I Fall to Pieces.” Sparrows bicker overhead.
Screed of the grinder, the band saw’s groan and wail.
In his boredom the boy in Diderot
studies again through the shop’s open door
the buttresses of Suger’s cathedral
and imagines the young Leonardo in his apprenticeship
staring through the window at Brunelleschi’s dome,
solid yet miraculous, a resurrected body, floating above the city.
Outside, a cowbird cries, flapping up from the pipe rack,
the ruffling of wings like a quilt flung over a bed.
Snow settles on the tops of cans, black rings in a white field.
The stock, cut clean, gleams under lamplight.
After work, I wade back through the silence of the shop:
the lathes shut down, inert, like enormous animals in hibernation,
red oil rags lying limp on the shoulders
of machines, dust motes still climbing shafts
of dawn light, hook and hoist chain lying desultory
as an old drunk collapsed outside a bar,
barn sparrows pecking on the shores of oil puddles—
emptiness, wholeness; a cave, a cathedral.
As morning light washes the walls of Florence,
the boy Leonardo mixes paints in Verrocchio’s shop
and watches the new apprentice muddle
the simple task of the Madonna’s shawl.
Leonardo whistles a canzone and imagines
a lathe: the spindle, bit, and treadle, the gleam of brass.
FROM
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
(2003)
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. . . . By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
—JAMES AGEE, A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat
of his father’s Ford and the mysterium
of time, holds time in memory with words,
night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south
of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks
the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences
and rattles the battered DEKALB sign to make
the child think of time in its passing, of death.
Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.
Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank,
the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging
a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind
of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs,
locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.
The great horse people, his father, these sounds,
these shapes saved from time’s dark creek as the car
moves across the moving earth: world, this world.
Moses Yellowhorse Is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt
The combed lawn of the Villa Carlotta
cools the bare feet of my aesthetic friend
cooing Beautiful, so beautiful, a dream . . .
beneath the fat leaves of catalpa trees,
and my Marxist friend—ironic, mordant—
groans, Ah, yes, indeed, how beautifully
the rich lie down upon the backs of the poor,
but I am somewhere else, an empty field
near Black Bear Creek in western Oklahoma,
brought there by that ancient word, dream,
my father saying, You had the dream, Horse,
and two men toss a baseball back and forth
as the sun dissolves behind the pearl-gray strands
of a cirrus and the frayed, flaming branches
along the creek so that the men, too, seem
to be on fire, and the other one, a tall Pawnee
named Moses Yellowhorse, drops his glove,
But I wasn’t a man there, and there, I know,
is Pittsburgh, and man means something more
like human, for as a boy I had heard
this story many times, beginning, always,
He was the fastest I ever caught—the fastest,
I think, there ever was, and I was stunned
because for a boy in America, to be the fastest
was to be a god, and now my father
and his brothers move behind a scrim
of dust in a fallow wheat field, a blanket
stretched between two posts to make a backstop,
stand of maize to mark the outfield wall,
while their father watches, If an Indian
can make it, then so by God can they,
and so it goes, this story of failure
in America: Icarus unwarned,
strapped with his father’s wings, my father
one winter morning patching the drive line
of an old Ford tractor with a strand
of baling wire, blood popping out along
his knuc
kles, and then in fury turning
to his father, I’m not good enough,
I’ll never get there, and I’m sorry,
I’m goddamned sorry, while Moses Yellowhorse
is drunk again and throwing water balloons
from the Hotel Roosevelt because now
he is “Chief” Yellowhorse, and even though
in a feat of almost angelic beauty
he struck out Gehrig, Ruth, and Lazzeri
with nine straight heaters, something isn’t right,
so one day he throws a headball at Ty Cobb,
then tells my father, He was an Indian-hater,
even his teammates smiled, and now, trying
to explain this to my friends, it occurs to me
that, unlike the Villa Carlotta, baseball is
a question of neither beauty nor politics
but rather mythology, the collective dream,
the old dream, of men becoming gods
or at the very least, as they remove
their wings, being recognized as men.
Mrs. Hill
I am so young that I am still in love
with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings,
submarines powered by baking soda,
whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually,
not even them. Nobody can hear them.
Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering
on our front door shouting, and my father
in his black and gold gangster robe lets her in
trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow
pleading, oh I’m so sorry, so sorry,
so sorry, and clutching the neck of her gown
as if she wants to choke herself. He said
he was going to shoot me. He has a shotgun
and he said he was going to shoot me.
I have never heard of such a thing. A man
wanting to shoot his wife. His wife.
I am standing in the center of a room
barefoot on the cold linoleum, and a woman
is crying and being held and soothed
by my mother. Outside, through the open door
my father is holding a shotgun,
and his shadow envelops Mr. Hill,
who bows his head and sobs into his hands.
A line of shadows seems to be moving
across our white fence: hunched-over soldiers
on a death march, or kindly old ladies
in flower hats lugging grocery bags.
At Roman’s Salvage tire tubes
are hanging from trees, where we threw them.
In the corner window of Beacon Hardware there’s a sign:
WHO HAS 3 OR 4 ROOMS FOR ME. SPEAK NOW.
For some reason Mrs. Hill is wearing mittens.
Closed in a fist, they look like giant raisins.
In the Britannica Junior Encyclopaedia
the great Pharoahs are lying in their tombs,
the library of Alexandria is burning.
Somewhere in Cleveland or Kansas City
the Purple Heart my father refused in WWII
is sitting in a Muriel cigar box,
and every V-Day someone named Schwartz
or Jackson gets drunk and takes it out.
In the kitchen now Mrs. Hill is playing
gin rummy with my mother and laughing
in those long shrieks that women have
that make you think they are dying.
I walk into the front yard where moonlight
drips from the fenders of our Pontiac Chieftain.
I take out my dog whistle. Nothing moves.
No one can hear it. Dogs are asleep all over town.
The Potato Eaters
They are gathered there, as I recall, in the descending light
of Kansas autumn—the welder, the machinist, the foreman,
the apprentice—with their homemade dinners
in brown sacks lying before them on the broken rotary table.
The shop lights have not yet come on. The sun ruffling
the horizon of wheat fields lifts their gigantic shadows
up over the lathes that stand momentarily still and immense,
sleeping gray animals released from the turmoil,
the grind of iron and steel, these past two days.
There is something in the droop of the men’s sleeves
and heavy underwater movements of their arms and hands
that suggests they are a dream and I am the dreamer,
even though I am there, too. I have just delivered the dinners
and wait in a pool of shadows, unsure of what to do next.
They unwrap the potatoes from the aluminum foil
with an odd delicacy, and I notice their still blackened hands
as they halve and butter them. The coffee sends up steam
like lathe smoke, and their bodies slowly relax
as they give themselves to the pleasure of the food
and the shop’s strange silence after hours of noise,
the clang of iron and the burst and hiss of the cutting torch.
Without looking up, the machinist says something
to anyone who will listen, says it into the great cave
of the darkening shop, and I hear the words, life,
my life. I am a boy, so I do not know true weariness,
but I can sense what these words mean, these gestures,
when I stare at the half-eaten potatoes, the men,
the shadows that will pale and vanish as the lights come on.
Hearing Parker the First Time
The blue notes spiraling up from the transistor radio
tuned to WNOE, New Orleans, lifted me out of bed
in Seward County, Kansas, where the plains wind riffed
telephone wires in tones less strange than the bird songs
of Charlie Parker. I played high school tenor sax the way,
I thought, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young might have
if they were, like me, untalented and white, but “Ornithology”
came winding up from the dark delta of blues and Dixieland
into my room on the treeless and hymn-ridden high plains
like a dust devil spinning me into the Eleusinian Mysteries
of the jazz gods though later I would learn that his long
apprenticeship in Kansas City and an eremite’s devotion
to the hard rule of craft gave him the hands that held
the reins of the white horse that carried him to New York
and 52nd Street, farther from wheat fields and dry creek beds
than I would ever travel, and then carried him away.
Delivering Eggs to the Girls’ Dorm
I am the eggman, . . .
—JOHN LENNON
For me it was the cherry blossoms flooding
Olive Street and softening the dawn,
the windows flung open in a yawn,
billowing curtains pregnant with the breeze,
the sounds of Procul Harum entering the air,
and fifty girls rising in their underwear.
O lost love. My girl and I had just split up.
The leaves of chestnut trees were rinsed in black,
the wind moaned grief, the moon was on the rack.
Humped over, stacking egg crates in my Ford,
I was Charles Laughton ringing bells at Notre Dame—
spurned, wounded, but still in love with Sheila Baum.
Arriving at the gates of paradise,
I rang the service bell to wait on
Mrs. Cornish in her saintly apron
fumbling at the door, and the raucous gush
of female voices when she opened it. The flour
in her beard announced the darkness of the hour:
You’re late. The hiss of bacon, pancake batter
as it kissed the grill, were a swarm of snakes to warn
the innocent away. Inside
were virgins born,
like Sheila Baum, to stay that way. Outside
stood the egg man, despairing in his oval fate:
fifty girls staring, eggless, at an empty plate.
They may still be staring there. For emptiness
became my theme, sweeping eggshells
from my car, driving empty streets, fall’s
cherry trees as bare as dormitory walls
washed by September rains. And the bells of Notre Dame
were as still as the broken shell of my dream of Sheila Baum.
Rave On
. . . Wild to be wreckage forever.
—JAMES DICKEY, “CHERRYLOG ROAD”
Rumbling over caliche with a busted muffler,
radio blasting Buddy Holly over Baptist wheat fields,
Travis screaming out Prepare ye the way of the Lord
at jackrabbits skittering beneath our headlights,
the Messiah coming to Kansas in a flat-head Ford
with bad plates, the whole high plains holding its breath,
night is fast upon us, lo, in these the days of our youth,
and we were hell on wheels or thought we were. Boredom
grows thick as maize in Kansas, heavy as drill pipe
littering the racks of oil rigs where in summer boys
roustabout or work on combine crews north as far
as Canada. The ones left back in town begin
to die, dragging Main Street shit-faced on 3.2 beer
and banging on the whorehouse door in Garden City
where the ancient madam laughed and turned us down
since we were only boys and she knew our fathers.
We sat out front spitting Red Man and scanned a landscape
flat as Dresden: me, Mike Luckinbill, Billy Heinz,
and Travis Doyle, who sang, I’m gonna live fast,
love hard, and die young. We had eaten all the life
there was in Seward County but hungry still, hauled ass
to old Arkalon, the ghost town on the Cimarron
that lay in half-shadow and a scattering of starlight,
and its stillness was a kind of death, the last breath
of whatever in our lives was ending. We had drunk there
and tossed our bottles at the walls and pissed great arcs
into the Kansas earth where the dust groweth hard
The Blue Buick Page 8