Mexico Series, Early Morning Light , Pastel, by John Cummings
WOLVERINES
How they stood in the doorway
without his feet in them, steel-toed
and pocked with burns. Those boots
kept him mostly safe from rogue sparks
as he welded continuous rail from Louisa
to Pikeville, Kentucky. It was no pretty place
to live or work. We honeymooned there
so he wouldn’t lose a week’s pay.
I sat on the green chenille of the motel bed
reading A Christmas Carol for the third time,
the Ghost of Christmas Past pretending to matter
to the future which is now the present
which I see drawn out in miles of continuous rail
he would grind and weld for seventeen years.
Meanwhile, I walked to the front desk
for a Pay Day and a can of Diet Squirt.
The woman in her faded housedress
seemed genuine, nice. As if everything
would work out, the solitude, the blatantly
no-frills life. But the track said something different,
that everyone eventually wants to be some place else.
A pair of boots stands in the corner, a life emptied
becomes a shell to protect the spirit even though
the spirit left. I understand why we name inanimate
things for animals. Like my memory needs
to keep coming to life, become an animal
where it can bare its fangs, work its tongue.
And if it can’t manage such posturing,
I imagine it heading for the hills while I call its name,
as if calling something what it’s not could lure it back,
but he lay down in the weeds and unlaced himself,
asking me not to make him larger than life.
_______________
Jane Ann Fuller
Review by Jared Pearce
The ending of this piece is, for me, what makes it so wonderful. While I do love the images that help me consider what it is to grind and drive a job, a future, a relationship, a life, or even a host of lives, it’s the end where nothing big is to be gained, where no figure or truth except the bits and glimpses we catch as we live are to remain, where we’re all symbolized by something old, beat up, discarded. Not that it’s a downer (though I guess it kind of is), but that it’s reverent in its starkness.
Review by Nathan E. Lewis
If she read this poem at his funeral, then she certainly would have denied his dying request. If we, by reading her poem, are peaking into her private pondering of what makes a life meaningful, then we have much to consider. Should we listen to the track or to his well-worn Wolverines?
Review by Dave Mehler
Oof!