03-24-2020

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Mark Wagenaar

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Salvage

 

The salvage yard’s forty acres of brokedown

busted-up wrecks, where we once got fifty bucks

for our grocery getter, an ’89 wagon.

My father & I stalk aisles of cars & trucks

 

for replacement parts—rims, belts, compressor.

Pops a hood—holds a lighter up in the skull,

runs a hand along the radiator.

Nothing lasts, but nothing’s irreplaceable—

 

except for the faulty parts he passed down.

Same lousy knees, leaky valves—blood flow  

half-slowed in his Gremlin heart. Same depression,

 

same blown hippocampus. All this, yet a grin

when he sees the old ’Vette: 16 again, all show  

& fro, gunning down Main St for the horizon.

 

 

 

Letter to My Daughter Perhaps Someday

 

It’s the little things that matter, the gurus & diamond companies

keep telling us. Too often I look through my shoelaces into the earth,

 

& miss the semaphore of bows & loop-de-loops before I walk out,

today, into a too-early spring day with you, sleeping in one arm.

 

Secret tongues of shoes, those little boats you tie up to unmoor,

what conspiracy will it be today, where are they plotting to take us?

 

Knots, language in which you can untie yourself from the world,

from the likely & the possible, words you can cut in half.

 

Maybe there’s a knot that could stand in for robin in Inupiat,

language of the Alaskan Eskimos,  since there is no word for robin,

 

they’ve never needed one: lariats & trefoils in horsehair or blue ribbons

for nape & tail feather, a Portugese bowline for hollow bones (is it true

 

they walk out into the next snowstorm when it’s their time to go?).

Last night I dreamed a knot of your hair drifted on a river, just beyond

 

my reach. A perfect despair. A perfect circle of hair, though that might be

impossible, even electrons have rough edges, even the circles

 

of the underworld, & the gold record borne on the Voyager spacecraft

that drifts forever, like the Hunter Gracchus, through space,

 

even that record with one hundred hellos scratched in one hundred

languages has its flaws. Scratched like your face, when you Houdini

 

out of your swaddle straightjacket & jab yourself with your fingernails

when you startle awake. Love is the dream of the dying, I want to tell you,

 

or maybe just another dying, some bloodknot of light that weaves us

to each other, but you’re beyond language—or yet to recognize it

 

in your thirty days upon this earth. You wrap your hand around

my finger—a circle, if the diameter is all the days I’ll be missing you,

 

& even in this circle there is an infinite pi that holds our lives somewhere

in its sea of decimals—as it begins to snow on this lonely avenue.

 

Snows right through my chest when I watch you sleep. What does your

tomorrow look like? What do your dreams look like the day after?

 

Forgive me my failings. My lack of ambition. I thought my shoes

would take me somewhere. I have no way to tell you what your hair

 

is like in my hand, on this day, one of the last days I’ll have more hair

than you. You may as well be in space, where the earth

 

is a bluewhite circle far away, a rounded lily, a boutonnière on the lapels

of space. And tomorrow, or a day far hence I hope, a perfect flower

 

on my dark suit, when I’m laid out, when you let go of my hand.

 

 

 

Winter Song

                                                         

In the sound of pellet snow falling

on still-green leaves, magnolia & oak,

I hear ten thousand brushes on the high hat,

 

someone whispering for Elijah,

time scraping ghost towns

from the map. I hear the last

 

percussive rasp of the song

cut off by the bone saw’s cry

yesterday in the slaughterhouse.

 

A vanished song for the vanished,

one for the windows of ice

the wind’s cleared from the snow

 

on the reservoir. Lakeside,

I catch myself thinking the patches

are all the nights we won’t get back—

 

if I look long enough

I’ll see a face I loved.

I don’t know who I’m waiting for.

 

Childhood friends, old loves.

Maybe my grandfather’s face,

unmarked by death.

 

Maybe the pages of my life’s history

in the unreadable scrawl

of the town drunk will appear

 

in the onyx glass,

color of the night hours

that find my grandmother awake

 

belted to her insomnia.

Give it time. Soon the faces

will begin to surface

 

like coins, like a well giving up

its wishes. And when they do,

 

they’ll have no more to say

than we do, when I ask them

what this morning is the empty

 

throat of, what happens to all

flesh, or just what the question is,

if our passing’s the answer.

​

-from Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, Red Hen Press (July 3, 2018)

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MARK WAGENAAR is the author of three prize-winning books of poetry, including the just-released Saltman Prize-winning Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, from Red Hen Press. His other two are Voodoo Inverso and The Body Distances (A Hundred Blackbirds Rising), winner of the Pollak Prize and the Juniper Prize, respectively. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New Yorker, 32 Poems, Field, Southern Review, Tin House, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, Image, and many others, and he has won a variety of prizes, including the James Wright Poetry Prize, the Mary C. Mohr Poetry Prize, the CBC Poetry Prize, the Auburn Poetry of Witness Prize, the New Letters Prize, and the Pinch Poetry Prize. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of North Texas, an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia, & an M.A. in English from the University of Northern Iowa. A former Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, and Summer Poet-in-Residence at Ole Miss, he is an Assistant Professor at Valparaiso University.