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The 1950s

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
 
The 1950s Initial Exploration
“Let’s take the car after school,” the two girls
would say, which meant they wanted to be taken
by it, the top down, the wind surfing over
the wrap-around window. The stepdaughter,Carol, always drove, just as her new stepfather
insisted, and while her girlfriend Debbie listened
for the lighter to pop out from the dash,
and with its tiny, interior hotplate lit menthol

cigarettes one by one for both of them, they thought
about how the boys would admire them.
When they drove into their station at the A&W
and Carol unhooked the mic to order their Cokes,

pushing back her shoulder length hair to reveal
her long throat, she thought she resembled
a popular singer. “Beautiful” was the word
the boys used to describe the car as they gathered

around it, stroking its curves and sometimes
asking if they could see what was under
the hood. Then they looked into Carol’s amazing
and frightening blue eyes, or Debbie’s warm,

compliant ones, the door or fender giving them a way
to steady themselves. All of that was OK
with the stepfather, who required only that they let
no boys inside, or they could never borrow

the car again. Handsome like a man, he really wasn’t
much more than a boy himself, and not wanting to be
anyone’s father, told them to call him “Petey.”
As he said goodbye in his T-shirt some afternoons,

leaning comfortably into the open window of his new
Chevy convertible, he would call Debbie
“Ginger Snap,” and his stepdaughter, his favorite,
with a knowing wink, “Angel Pie.” He was proud

of the sinuous Hawaiian woman in green he wore
on his muscular forearm and the darker tattoo
in cursive letters of his own name underneath, the same
tattoo he had his new wife ink on the inside

of her ankle. “Don’t you go changing on me,”
he would say with a smile before they headed out
the driveway and the motion rose in their ears, but
the two in the car were already changing, Debbie,

who hoped each day at the A&W for a certain
cute boy to return her gaze, and Carol, in distress
because she couldn’t quite get the muscular forearm
and the wink out of her mind even after she touched

her cigarette to the lighter and took a deep
drag and tried to find a good station on the radio.
 
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Hymn to the Comb-Over

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
 
Hymn to the Comb-Over Initial Exploration
How the thickest of them erupt just
above the ear, cresting in waves so stiff
no wind can move them. Let us praise them
in all of their varieties, some skinny
as the bands of headphones, some rising
from a part that extends halfway around
the head, others four or five strings
stretched so taut the scalp resembles
a musical instrument. Let us praise the sprays
that hold them, and the combs that coax
such abundance to the front of the head
in the mirror, the combers entirely forget
the back. And let us celebrate the combers,
who address the old sorrow of time’s passing
day after day, bringing out of the barrenness
of mid-life this ridiculous and wonderful
harvest, no wishful flag of hope but, thick
or thin, the flag itself, unfurled for us all
in subways, offices and malls across America.
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It

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
 
It Initial Exploration
Don’t fall for it.
Don’t scratch it.
Don’t spoil it for everyone else.
Don’t take it for granted.It’s not anything to play with.
It’s not the end of the world.
It’s not brain surgery.
That’s not it.I used to have cravings for it.
It’s the last thing I need right now.
I wish it would just go away.
I can’t take it anymore.

Why is it so important to you?
Why did you laugh about it?
Why can’t you just be quiet about it?
Is it all about you?

It’s all sticky.
It’s giving me the creeps.
It’s worse than I thought.
You’re getting it all over yourself.

This is no place for it.
There’s no excuse for it.
Take it outside.
Get over it.
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Driving North in Winter

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

Driving North in Winter Initial Exploration
All the way to Mercer these
rooms left out
in the dark—lamplight and two chairs
the old couple sit
reading in,a table where a family
comes together
for dinner—

the rest of the houses, one
with the night. How
blessed they are,

the man hanging his ordinary
coat in the small world
of a kitchen,

the woman turning to her cupboard,
both of them held
from the cold

and the vastness by nothing
but trusting
inattention

and one beam of light,
like us passing by
in the darkness,

you napping, me wide awake
and grateful for this
moment

we’ve also been given, apart
in our way of being
together, living

in the light.
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Charles by Accident

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

Charles by Accident Initial Exploration
Named Charlie for the relaxed
companionship we expected,
he became Charles for his butler-like
obedience, though he went off-dutythe morning my wife walked back
from the mailbox watching him toss
what looked like a red sock
gloriously into the air,seeing it was actually the cardinal
she had been feed ing all winter.
Why did she scream like that
was the question his whole,

horrified body seemed to ask, just
before he disappeared, back soon
at the door, black coat, white collar,
all ready to serve us: who was

that other dog, anyway? Who,
on the other hand, was this one,
chosen at the pound for his breed
and small size, now grown into three

or four different kinds of large
dogs stuck together. It wasn’t his fault,
of course, that in the end he wasn’t
Charlie, or even, considering it the way

he barked at guests and sniffed them.
Charles exactly. Besides, it couldn’t
have been easy to be whatever
sort of dog he was. Part retriever,

he spent his winters biting ice,
and summers dirt out of his tufted paws.
Part Collie, all he ever got to herd
were two faux sheep: a wire haired terrier

that bit him back and a cat that turned
and ran up trees. An accidental sheep-dog,
Charles by accident, and our dog only
after hed been disowned, he understood

that life is all missed connections
and Plan B—that reason why, perhaps,
no one could quite pat him or say
good boy enough, and why sometimes,

asleep, he mourned, working his legs
as if running to a place he could never
reach, beyond Charles or any other
way we could think of to call him.
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The Rules of the New Car

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

The Rules of the New Car Initial Exploration
After I got married and became
the stepfather of two children, just before
we had two more, I bought it, the bright
blue sorrowful car that slowly turned
to scratches and the flat black spots
of gum in the seats and stains impossible
to remove from the floor mats. “Never again.”
I said as our kids, four of them by now,
climbed into the new car. “This time,
there will be rules.” The first to go
was the rule I made for myself about
cleaning it once a week, though why,
I shouted at the kids in the rearview mirror,
should I have to clean it if they would just
remember to fold their hands. Three years
later, it was the same car I had before,
except for the dent my wife put in the grille
when, ignoring the regulation about snacks,
she reached for a bag of chips on her way
home from work and hit a tow truck. Oh,
the ache I felt for the broken rules,
and the beautiful car that had been lost,
and the car that we now had, on soft
shocks in the driveway, still unpaid for.
Then one day, for no particular reason except
that the car was loaded down with wood
for the fireplace at my in-laws’ camp
and groceries and sheets and clothes
for the week, my wife in the passenger seat,
the dog lightly panting beside the kids in the back,
all innocent anticipation, waiting for me
to join them, I opened the door to my life.
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Smoking

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem
 
Smoking Initial Exploration
Once, when cigarettes meant pleasure
instead of death, before Bogart
got lung cancer and Bacall’s
voice, called “smoky,” fellinto the gravel of a lower octave,
people went to the movies just
to watch the two of them smoke.
Life was nothing but a job,Bogart’s face told us, expressionless
except for the recurrent grimace,
then it lit up with the fire
he held in his hands and breathed

into himself with pure enjoyment
until each word he spoke afterward
had its own tail of smoke.
When he offered a cigarette

to Bacall, she looked right at him,
took it into her elegant mouth
and inhaled, while its smoke curled
and tangled with his. After the show,

just to let their hearts race and taste
what they’d seen for themselves,
the audiences felt in purses,
shirt pockets, and even inside

the sleeves of T-shirts, where packs
of cigarettes were folded, by a method
now largely forgotten. “Got a light?”
somebody would say, “Could I burn

one of yours?” never thinking
that two of the questions most
asked by Americans everywhere
would undo themselves and disappear

like the smoke that rose
between their upturned fingers,
unwanted in a new nation
of smoke-free movie theaters,

malls and restaurants, where politicians
in every state take moral positions
against cigarettes so they can tax them
for their favorite projects. Just fifty years

after Bogart and Bacall, smoking
is mostly left in the hands of waitresses
huddled outside fancy inns, or old
clerks on the night shift in mini-marts,

or hard-hats from the road crew
on a coffee-break around the battered
tailgate of a sand truck—all paying
on installment with every drag

for bridges and schools. Yet who else
but these, who understand tomorrow
is only more debt, and know
better than Bogart that life is work,

should be trusted with this pleasure
of the tingling breath they take today,
these cigarettes they bum and fondle,
calling them affectionate names

like “weeds” and “cancer sticks,” holding
smoke and fire between their fingers
more casually than Humphrey Bogart
and blowing it into death’s eye.
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Voiceless

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

Voiceless Initial Exploration
The swelling
that starts under the eye
of the mother rising
for third shift, then
turns into a welt.The ill man’s hand
on the banister
as he climbs step
by step listening
to his quickening heart.The silence of cats
watching the old woman
in a bathrobe explain to them
how everyone loved her
in the red dress.

The bowed head
of the son in the chair
too afraid to tell
his certain, angry father
he is not to blame.

The still chest of the wife
who has learned
not to have feelings
so her vigilant husband
will not know them.

The face nobody sees
on the glass door
of the cooler, not even
the one who opens it to stock
cases, night after night.
 
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Shovels

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Listen to Wes McNair Reading the Poem

Shovels Initial Exploration
Who could have guessed he would choose
to spend so much of his time bent over
a shovel, one wrist so weak he wore
an ace bandage on it, his asthmatic lungs
forcing him to stop for breath again
and again. “Never mind,” he would say to us,
his three young stepsons, when we
stopped too, “get back to work.”
Every weekend
for a whole winter, we hauled cinders
from the paper mill to level the driveway.
That next spring he had us digging holes
for the barn’s corner posts, angry that we kept
fighting with each other in our anger
about the endlessness of banging our shovels
into the nearly frozen ground. Why did he
drive us that way? Why was he so hard
on himself, always the last one to come
in the house out of the dark.
One summer
we dug until we found ourselves inside
a waist-high trench he said would bring water
up from the river to the plants of his nursery.
“You’ll never get anywhere,” he told us,
“until you learn the meaning of work.”Above ground in the moonlight, as I return
through this poem, the tall grass has no idea
where we laid that pipe. The sprinkler system
for the nursery, dead for years, has forgotten why.
All the truckloads of fill we brought to prevent

the bank’s erosion are on their way down
into the river. In the back of the old barn,
its aluminum siding curled from the weather,
the shovels we once used stand upside down
against the wall in the window’s light like flowers,
making a kind of memorial to the work
we did then, some with blunted points, some
scalloped at the center, where after all those years
of shoveling, the shoveled themselves away.
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