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Teaching Cluster

Love Story

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
 
Love Story Initial Exploration
What was opening the door
those years ago to let our four kids
one by one followed by the dog
into the back seat of the old compact car
we’d parked in the driveway
next to the down-hill road because
the battery went dead the day before—
what, but a prayer?What were our arguments
as we tried to time my pushing
the family down the road and your
taking your foot off the clutch
to start the car, through instead bringing it
to a dead stop over and over—
what, but an agreement to go on
despite our limitations?

What was the moment
in the midst of our despair
when the engine suddenly caught
and you roared away and came back
for me, and I got in by the soda can
on the floor and the dog now sitting
between us on the emergency brake,
the whole family smiling

as the trees broke apart faster and faster
above our heads—what, but a blessing?
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First Snowfall

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

First Snowfall Initial Exploration
It is touching
the highest fingers
of the trees
which have longedfor it all this time,
and it is sifting down
over the store with the sign
in the window

that says Come in
we’re open and the sign
on the door that says
We’re closed,

and it is blowing
across the gray stacks
of lumber and the jacked-
up trailer of a semi

at Dan’s Custom
Sawing, and on the Rome
Road it is coming down
on the shoulders

of telephone poles
struggling uphill carrying wire
to the double-wide
and the farmhouse

with the year-round Christmas
lights, in season once more,
and slowly, softly in the dark
it is once more

bearing down
on the old, collapsing barn
to squeeze the row
of windows

shut, nobody up
to see it fill the driveways
and walkways except
a snowplow

holding a small light
ahead of itself opening the street
that vanishes in the long
drift and dream

of it, coming down
over the whole town
where everyone
under every

last, lost roof is now far away
and all gone
and good night.
 
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Shame

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

Shame Initial Exploration
“You are beyond shame,”
my mother said after
my father left us. “What else
are you hiding?” I never told her
about the photograph
of naked women and men
in a cart beside a fence
from his book about the war,
some with hair at their crotches,
some with asses like mine,like everyone’s except,
being dead, they had nothing
to hide, and the shame
was all mine for finding them
I went on turning its pages,

time after time, past
the portraits of generals
wearing ties like my father,
past flashes of gunfire
and rolling hills of smoke

and flame, to these
forgotten ones, lying
together in their secret, more
frightening than my mother
chasing me from couch

to chair with her switch
to make war against
her broken heart. For in this
place there was no running
or screaming. Here

nobody knew their terrible
stillness but me, the one
beyond shame, who left them
all naked, and returned
to find them, and never told
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Losing My Hair

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
 
Losing My Hair Initial Exploration
In the old allegory of the wolves
chasing the dog sled across
the tundra in the waninglight of life, I myself
am suddenly the aging man

who must reach inside his chest
to find some failed organ
that might appease them,
though all I have now
to throw over my shoulder

is this small offering the lifts
in the wind when I turn back
flying apart so high above them
it has nothing to do
with the gathering dark

of their bodies, and their swift
legs that barely touch the snow,
and their cold, patient eyes.
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November 22, 1963

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

November 22, 1963
 Initial Exploration
We were just starting out when it happened.
At the school where I taught the day was over.
As far as they could tell, it wouldn’t be fatal.
But the principal couldn’t finish the announcement.At the school where I taught the day was over.
I had a dentist appointment right after work.
But the principal couldn’t finish the announcement.
By then, we now know, the president was dead.

I had a dentist appointment right after work.
On the way, I hurried home to tell my wife.
By then, we now know, the president was dead.
I remember Jackie’s pink pillbox hat in the film.

On the way, I hurried home to tell my wife.
Turn off the vacuum cleaner! I shouted at her.
I remember Jackie’s pink pillbox hat in the film.
I kept thinking I was going to be late.

Turn off the vacuum cleaner! I shouted at her.
I had never made her cry like that.
I kept thinking I was going to be late.
In one frame Kennedy’s head goes out of focus.

I had never made her cry like that.
The funny thing was, the dentist didn’t care.
In one frame Kennedy’s head goes out of focus.
We didn’t realize there would soon be others.

The funny thing was, the dentist didn’t care.
We were just starting out when it happened.
We didn’t realize there would soon be others.
As far as they could tell, it wouldn’t be fatal.
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Love Poem

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

Love Poem Initial Exploration
In the beautiful double light of the pond,
our day together has seemed more
than a single day, and now the sunset
clouds of the pond’s second sky stretch
all the way from our dock chairsto Lucy Point, which had no name
until Lucy, Bob and Rita’s dog, began
swimming ahead of them to reach it.
Imagine that the pond, which gradually
deepens the red of our sky, remembers

another sky, where the three of them
swim together for the first time,
unaware of the likeness beneath them.
Imagine this is the pond taking them in
with the wide, unblinking eye of its

perpetual knowing and remembering,
where all the days are one day. Here
is the loon that left behind the small, white
after-image of its breast, here above a brown
shadow is the beaver slowly moving

its nose-print. Around it is a darkening
twilight like ours, decades ago, when
the ghost of Harland Hutchinson,
on the roof of the pond’s original camp,
brings his hammer down in silence

making the delayed echo of each blow,
which is the pond listening and storing
the sound away in its pond mind. There,
my love, if you can imagine, it is always
twilight, and always the morning after

the hard freeze when long-dead Caroline
Barlach, up from New York City to winter
in her godforsaken shack and write the great
American novel, bends toward the hole
she has cut in the ice for water to creat,

unknown to her, a shaggy, unforgettable
cameo of her face. For nothing in the quick
double-knowing of the pond is ever lost,
though on this night as the wind comes up,
the single cry of a loon falls away

somewhere beyond Lucy Point,
and the reflection of the pines that rim
the pond darkens around us, and the ghosts
of you and me, barely visible off our dock,
break apart on waves beside a shifting moon.
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My Town

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

My Town Initial Exploration
Where it belongs on the state
tourist map, well above the red lobster
on the coast and in between the man
skiing down the slope and the shining dome
of the capitol building, you’ll find nothing
except a moose standing in the grass.
But who would come to this placeto see the three-foot long spotted
yellow butterflies faithfully displayed
on the side of LaFlamme’s house, or gather
with the others in the Grange Hall to hear
Ethel Chadwick recite with a lisp
and the dazed, oddly beautiful look
in her eye “The Cremation of Sam McGee”

in its entirety on Old Home Day?
Anyway, what (as people from the city
might say after straying off Route 2
to find our few houses thrown downhill
among the trees) do they do here
for work? Nothing important, as you might
guess from how early in the morning

they start up the hill to do it, driving
to the shoe shop two towns over,
or the paper mill, or just down the road
to the store, where Betty De Carlo stands all
day at the counter asking the same question:
“Can I help you?” I’m the one waiting
in line behind the couple with the skis

on their minivan who don’t even notice her alert,
genuine eyes, on their way through Eyeblink,
Maine, so someplace they’ve never heard of,
and I’m the one lying awake listening
to the cars struggling up our hill in the darkness
of 5 A.M. to start their long day,
and at twilight sitting down in the old parlor

with the Redlevskis, that’s me, with a bag
of rhubarb I’ve just picked from my garden
for the two of them. On the television
in the corner a frowning man, on mute,
mimes all the news of concern to the nation.
Meanwhile, they are talking about how good
it is to eat fresh sticks of rhubarb raw, a concern

so small you wouldn’t care much about it
unless you could be there to see the face
she makes for the taste, a mixture of sorrow
and pleasure that seems to have her whole life
in it, and to hear, in the lamplight, the intimate
twang of their voices telling me this news
at evening in my town, as I’m telling it

to you now, in this only other place I know
where unexpected things can happen, off the map.
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As I Am

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
 
As I Am Initial Exploration
Behind my false beard
and the frown line between
the eyebrows I have developedby trying to pay attention
to the world. I am the same kid
who could never remember

his library books or what
he had been sent to the store for.
“Fog” was the name my teachers

gave to where I spent my time,
a haze that even today
can descend while I’m having

a conversation, or suddenly lift,
revealing the wrong
landmarks drifting past me

on the wrong road I took ten
miles ago. God, it has been lonely
to turn up all those years

where everyone else has arrived
long since. Yet how, without
looking just beyond

the shoulders of others
as they spoke, or searching
everywhere for the pen

I found in my own hand,
could I concentrate on the thought
I learned to write down

at last, back from the place
that has wanted me off-course
and bewildered, just as I am.
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If You Had Come

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
 
If You Had Come Initial Exploration
If you had come into that room
after her stroke to find
my mother-in-law Sue Reed
and me, our heads bent
toward each other, making facesso her face would remember
what it had forgot
of the expressions for surprise
and dismay, or if
you had come in the momentI tried to teach her lips
by forming small lips
and making them breathe,
first to the left, then
to the right of my nose

until she began to laugh,
and laugh because she couldn’t
on one side, and both
of us laughed, you might
have imagined what we did

had less to do with instruction
or sorrow than the antics
of lovers, she giving me
her hand then, I taking it
in mine to stroke it

over and over in the pleasure
of being together in the room
where you might have come
to imagine the two of us
together, just as we were.
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The Last Black and White TV

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
 
The Last Black and White TV Initial Exploration
Were your parents, or you yourself
among those children who left their primitive
games of giant steps and hopscotch to gather
like stunned pygmies before cowboys
and puppets moving in the light of the firstblack and white TVs, square bulbs so heavy
it took two men to deliver them? As night
came on in suburban neighborhoods
perhaps like yours, families unfolded
the legs of dinner trays, longingto be in the studio audience with the host
of the variety show, or in the white kitchen
with the mother and her children as the father
arrived at the right moment in his dark suit
with the knowledge the rest of them craved.

“It needs more contrast,” someone would say,
adjusting a knob until the vegetable slicer
they saw between programs or the black and white
shoes or the kitchen range with the glow-clock
in the changing world behind the glass

looked real, then bought the slicer, the shoes,
the kitchen range, and even the new TV
that their old TV said would make them feel
like they were there. This was how the first
black and white TVs made their way

to the homes of the poor, who loved them best,
turning from disappointment all day long

to watch people opening the doors of ranges
and cars, or men with easy-going smiles
give them away on game shows. When they kicked

their sets or pounded them, it was mostly
because the picture was starting to roll
and ruin the happy ending they were so anxious
to see. The last black and white TV might have been
one of these, its console scarred by fists,

flipping scenes of game show contestants
and sheriffs bringing justice to Americans long ago
in the West out of sight again and again.
Or it may have been the set that played itself to death
above the heads of old folks at the nursing home

in the suburbs, grown sick of wonder and desire.
Or perhaps it stares by the old color set into t he dust
of your own attic among things you once discovered
on the screen and would hardly imagine longing for,
they are so strange, so useless, and so still.
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