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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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Transitions and Structure
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Endings and Line Breaks
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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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Transitions and Structure
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Endings and Line Breaks
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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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Transitions and Structure
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Endings and Line Breaks
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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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Transitions and Structure
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Endings and Line Breaks
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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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Transitions and Structure
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Endings and Line Breaks
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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.
Notebook Page 1
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Transitions and Structure
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 Transcript 2
   
Endings and Line Breaks
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 Transcript 3
 

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