Holes in the Mountain, and: Sunshine Liquidators, and: Jesse James Days, and: Bolinas, and: The Boy’s Head
Rent from DeepDyve- Holes in the Mountain, and: Sunshine Liquidators, and: Jesse James Days, and: Bolinas, and: The Boy’s Head
- Holes in the Mountain
Even the dead rats in the alleys of Oxford, head-crushed and tossed in a trash bag, left to fester behind the fence, are waiting for crows to divide them, to carry their bodies away. And if not crows, or the street pigeons picking a leg bone, then the broom of a street sweeper keeping a rhythm to one of the tunes in his head. Or the wind as it funnels the dust in a mini-tornado above him. Because it isn’t enough to say god is the speed of the wheel that turns the sky, or that god is the distance between two trains, hurtling at the same speed toward you. It doesn’t matter what stories we use to explain these impossible themes— they will always turn fake or explode in our faces. On Mount St. Helens the fires went into the roots of the oldest pines, smoldered and stayed in the coals for a month before burning the farms on the opposite side of the mountain. They found this out later, tracking a mouse through a network of intricate caves. We used to have ways of explaining our failures. Now all we do is erase them by spreading the veils of blame so thin. The scars on our hands are only around to remind us: don’t grow old in yourself, don’t get lost in this scrimmage. Because even death, in its marble skies and freewheeling borders, is an art of remembering everything over. And although the soul is a joke we tell to the part of ourselves we can touch, it’s only because the soul is a fire, and laughs at our sorrow, and has already survived us. [End Page 88]
“My poetry has always been about stories, about characters and voices and the landscapes they exist in. I write about beet fields in Northern Minnesota. I write about family and childhood friends, people I’ve met riding freight trains across the country. I try to create an inhabited world beyond what you find in the words. I like to imagine my poems as excerpts from a journal or travelogue rather than stand-alone pieces of art. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote, ‘Whoever touches this, touches a man,’ and I suppose I am drawn to a similar mode. All my poems are connected. The thoughts bleed forward and backward at once. They are extensions of each other, needled together by places and people and themes. One of those themes, perhaps the most prevalent in these poems, is an elegy to a failed American dream. The speaker is asking himself what remains once the romance has died, the land has been dredged, the myths have already been told.”
Kai Carlson-Wee has rollerbladed professionally, surfed north of the Arctic Circle and traveled across the country by freight train. His work has appeared in Linebreak, Best New Poets, Forklift Ohio and the Missouri Review. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco, California, where he is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.
- Sunshine Liquidators
for Anders
Biking through downtown Bellingham, nothing but partyboys staggering back to their cars in the dark, the sound of a distant muffler, the hum of a vent where the bakers are kneading the bread. We stop at the Sunshine Liquidators, opening bag after bag of garbage, hoping for bread or chips or eggs or cartons of soymilk, one day expired. My brother moves quietly over his headlamp, handing me overripe plantains and mangoes, Hass avocados from San Joaquin, spoiled and black in my hands. Maybe there’s something to save here, he says, passing a flat sack of carrot cake muffins, a Styrofoam package of trout. Above us the motion-light glosses a window, bending our shadows against the far wall, kinking our heads at the hard angles. I’m thinking what Tranströmer would say, or Knut Hamsun...
