Where Dying Engines Bled
after Jim Cory
I was born in the parlor of a tarpaper farmhouse.
We laid a rocking chair over the stain. Dad patched up rustbuckets.
Some came undone at the seams. Clean, like in manuals.
Some by blowtorch or reciprocating saw.
I had a muscle car. Rusty pieces of. It’d rattle and purr
and sweat, if ya fingered the carburetor right.
My only neighbor had a bigger beard than me. Tattoos for every communist
he killed.
So three. Taught me to pick a fiddle. I forgot.
There were always gunshots. Hunters or drunken hicks. I never killed nothing.
Fished the shit crick and flew a truck with no doors. I used to whoop.
My dog never wore no collar, never bathed. He followed me everywhere.
Ran miles after the bus. Coyotes run’d him off.
I’d never worn shoes til I was six years old.
In fall the leaves were knee deep and red. I wallowed in them.
| Jacob Mays |
|
levelheaded: Where Dying Engines Bled
Parts of this poem—the mangy but loyal dog, the shoeless child, the “drunken hicks”—are informed heavily by tropes of rural decay. But the poem complements those tropes with distinctive and often complex observations like “My only neighbor had a bigger beard than me” and “Some came undone at the seams. Clean, like in manuals.” In the latter of those observations for instance, “manuals” can refer to either instructional booklets or manual transmissions, but it also reminds us that “manual” labor is being performed.
The sounds of the poem match the poem’s almost romantic approach to a world (or at least a memory) overcast with violence and poverty. A subtle inconsistent rhyme weaves its way through the poem with “seams” and “clean,” “me” and “three,” “hicks” and “crick.” The poem is fully colloquial, yet it allows for rhyme. It is written as it would be spoken, but moments of poeticism like “flew a truck with no doors” and the opening line “I was born in the parlor of a tarpaper farmhouse” (which might also work as the opening sentence in a Victorian adventure novel) help us understand that we are witnessing the reminiscence of a complicated consciousness.
We get a bit of that consciousness when the speaker describes his car. The incomplete thought, “Rusty pieces of,” acts almost as a tiny footnote to the far more confident “I had a muscle car.” We can guess from this small moment alone that this speaker is (or was) boyishly confident and uncompromisingly realistic, even as those traits seem mutually exclusive. For so precise a phrase, it is informative in a fairly broad way. The same hesitant confidence becomes a sexy wink in the lines that follow: “It’d rattle and purr / and sweat, if ya fingered the carburetor right.”
The poem blooms from a “stain” on the floor, a stain tellingly sandwiched between the lines about speaker’s birth and the father’s dirty work. We can’t be sure which made the stain, but it’s this kind of ambiguity that allows the mangy dog and shoeless child to root the poem just deeply enough in a tradition to effectively commune with it. As the speaker’s memory moves to his car, his neighbors, his town, his dog, and autumn in his hometown, we can accept the poem on its own terms as a well-drawn memory gathering its own language up until the portrait is complete.
-The Editors
