64
2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
along the ground, / stretching the frets to their angled shadows, / pounding the stakes at their feet.” One thinks of Frost, those good fences that make good neighbors, but there is nothing good or redemptive about the invisible barbed wire separating this old couple. With fine understatement, McBride concludes by saying that it was “our last and longest season: / split wood, storm shutters, the manageable cold.” I like the way “last” unobtrusively lingers, his grandparents now seen from the telling perspective of distance and death. At the center of the book are a number of poems that describe another difficult relationship. However, before we get to that series with its cutting final separation, I’d like to show how McBride skillfully and subtly provides us with a thematic preview of this amputation, loss, and adjustment. In a poem that precedes the series, “Daily Round,” McBride suggests how habitual routine can deaden one’s senses, make one unaware until, at a stop light, a white-collar worker adjusts the rearview mirror to inspect his bleeding chin, cut while shaving, and catches something beyond his own reflected face from a new angle: Instead the backward backdrop startles him with something that he’s never seen straight on: Each roadside tree is barbered, the wide boughs cropped flat so that the aisles of wire can run between them like a poison vine. Oak, birch, willow – each is hale and halt: a sprawl of branches, a sudden making way. The horn behind him redirects his eye. He shifts the clutch, tunes the radio, and finds a song he hasn’t heard in years. The words come back unbidden and he sings, half wondering how the rootwork marks its loss, those vanished hemispheres and phantom limbs, the docked remainder, its odd lopsided bloom.
The amputation of tree limbs will be recalled in “Surgery Rotation,” in which a woman does a postmortem on her relationship with the speaker and coldly applies the scalpel, explaining that Something vital had failed to develop and died, though the attachment remained, deforming and unhealthy, draining life from the viable one, and needed to be severed – quickly, decisively. . . .
number 21
A few lines later, the closure hits hard: For the first time all summer, you spoke with a kind of glee, the week you said, “I want to be a surgeon” and ended things with me.
The neatness of the rhyme contrasts powerfully with the unstated emotional devastation of the speaker seen in the next four or five poems. But like those trees (from the earlier poem) that also endured severed limbs and survived, and like famous boxers who appear in various other poems, the speaker will lift himself from the canvas, recover balance, fight on, and eventually manage. Along with loss of love, we find the loss of a certain kind of religious belief. Before moving to Raleigh, McBride spent a Roman Catholic boyhood near Rochester, NY. In a number of poems, some of them funny, we encounter priests, nuns, and an ecclesiastical vocabulary. The beginning of disbelief comes in “Small Change,” when Father Conner plays a math trick on several boys he pays to pick up beer cans and wrappers around the playground and convent. In “Ecce Homo,” “three long-haired altar boys,” after midnight, visit the spot where a local gangster was killed by a car bomb in order to piss on the damaged pavement and feel the thrill of “blaspheming” as they intone, “Baptizo te in nomine . . . diaboli.” And in a lovely sonnet, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” the speaker and friends have skipped school to enjoy the lakeside freedom while “Sister Myra bored our history class.” At day’s end, they encounter an old fisherman and ask what he has caught. . . . “A week’s meals,” he sneered, tapping a bucket with his rod. The surface roiled – black and thick with eels. We ran. Remember? The thrill of it? The fear? The first time you said, “There isn’t any god”?
“Father Damien of Molokai” begins humorously with the speaker remembering how in school he thought he heard the nun say “leopard colony” instead of leper colony. But years later, as a tourist in Hawaii, where there are “no cats worth speaking of,” he quite accidentally finds himself at the Damien Museum. He realizes that “god’s work was stranger than it seemed” and
above RIGHT Timothy McBride signing books with Dorianne Laux after their readings at Quail Ridge Books & Music, Raleigh, NC, 1 May 2011