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Young Man Going Uphill With a Bird

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
Young Man Going Uphill With a Bird Initial Exploration
Going uphill toward her house in snow so deep
the road is gone, the lover walks the tops
of fence posts. Thoughts about his dying child,
or how to keep the farm after the fire
never enter his mind. Not that he’s so
preoccupied with balancing himself
in his workboots, but that the deaths of child
and farm haven’t yet happened, couldn’t happen
on such a luminous night, the gauzy moon
just rising over her father’s roof as if
to guide him there. The only howling comes
from her dog, Shep, who has already heard
his lurching steps, and perhaps even smells
the hurt bird he holds in his coat, a gift
he can hardly wait to give. No need to hurry.
Soon, farm boy become impresario,
he’ll lift his goat back from the kitchen table
and leave a creature there, dragging its wing.
Soon, cooing softly at its box, she’ll shoo
her younger sisters out and shut the door
and draw him close, finding in his grave, dark eyes
how well they’ve known each other all along.
Soon their long climb together will begin.
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The Abandonment

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
The Abandonment Initial Exploration
Climbing on top of him and breathing
into his mouth this way she could be showing her
desire except that when she draws back
from him to make her little cries
she is turning to her young son just
coming into the room to find his father my brother
on the bed with his eyes closed and the slightest
smile on his lips as if when they
both beat on his chest as they do now
he will come back from the dream his is enjoying
so much he cannot hear her calling his name
louder and louder and the sons saying get up
get up discovering both of them discovering
for the first time that all along
he has lived in this body this thing
with shut lids dangling its arms
that have nothing to do with him and everything
they can every know the wife listening weeping
at his chest and the mute son who will never
forget how she takes the face into her hands now
as if there were nothing in the world
but the face and breathes oh
breathes into the mouth which does not breathe back.
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After My Stepfather’s Death

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

After My Stepfather’s Death
 Initial Exploration
Again it is the moment before I left home
for good, and my mother is sitting quietly
in the front seat while my stepfather pulls me
and my suitcase out of the car and begins
hurling my clothes, though now
I notice for the first time how the wind
unfolds my white shirt and puts its slow
arm in the sleeve of my blue shirt and lifts them
all into the air above our heads so beautifully
I want to shout at him to stop and look up
at what he has made, but of course when I turn
to him, a small man, bitter even this young
that the world will not go his way, my stepfather
still moves in his terrible anger, closing the trunk,
and closing himself into the car as hard as he can,
and speeding away into the last years of his life.
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What It Is

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

What It Is Initial Exploration
It is not what,
carrying that
afterthought of legs,
he runs to, and not
what his interrogative, foldy
face detects
on the floor, because
it is always changing, always
turning out to be
some other bug
or bush his nose wanted,
leaving his tail
smoldering
behind, and
it is never,
after all that scratching
and lifting of leg,
enough; not even
after he joins
the dinner party, smiling
upside-down
and rolling
his testicles, not even
in his whimpering sleep,
dreaming in the tips
of his paws
that he is chasing
it, that very thing
which, scratching,
he can’t quite
reach, nor sniffing find,
because in the perfect
brainlessness of dog,
he will never know
what it is.
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A Traveler’s Advisory

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
  
A Traveler’s Advisory
 Initial Exploration
The main streets of towns
don’t go uphill,
and the houses aren’t
purple like that
tenement with one eye
clapboarded over. Never mind
how it wavers
backward, watching you
try to find second gear.
You’ve arrived
at the top of the town:
a closed gas station
where nobody’s dog
sits, collarless,
and right next door
a church that seems
to advertise Unleaded.
Who’s hung this
great front door
above no steps? No one
you’d know.
And what suspends
the avalanche
of barn? Nothing,
and you will never
escape the bump,
lifting shiny with tar.
And you won’t
need the sign that says
you are leaving Don’t Blink,
Can’t Dance,
or Town of No.
 
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The Before People

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

The Before People Initial Exploration
There is a moment when they turn
into the ads that are meant for them
and are happy, a moment when the fat woman
thinks of melting her body away in seven days,
and the shut-in imagines big money
without leaving his home. Slowly,
as if for the first time, they read
the italics of their deepest wishes:
Made $5,000 in first month,
Used to call me Fatty, and all
the people with no confidence,
no breasts, or hair in the wrong places,
find pictures of the amazing results
in their own states. They have overlooked
the new techniques and the research
of doctors in Germany, they know that now,
suddenly so pleased they can hardly
remember being sad in this, their moment,
before, just before they lie back on the beds
in their small rooms and think about how foolish
they are or how farfetched it is or anything
except the actual photographs of their dreams.
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