Margotlog: An Ozark Family: Wesley McNair's The Lost Child

Margotlog: An Ozark Family: Wesley McNair's The Lost Child  (Part 1 of 3)

     When we first moved to Kansas City, Missouri, years ago, the city seemed not much different from cities I'd known on the east coast. That is, until one June morning when I opened the door to find six, black Angus steers standing in our parking lot.

     Kansas City was a cow town. And didn't I remember that Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" lived in Kansas? Maybe Oz referred to the Ozarks.

     That summer we rented a cabin and a canoe in the Ozarks. As our host slid the boat into the Niangua River, he pointed downstream. "There's a shy-poke," he said with a grin. I scanned the water but had no idea what he meant.

     It's hard bringing to life the shy pockets of life hidden from the main currents. Recently attending a workshop in New York, I enjoyed meeting Maine's (soon-to-retire) poet laureate Wesley McNair. Listening to his almost uninflected speech, I wondered what it was like for him to live as far north/east as we lived north/central. Yet though I was intrigued by his Maine poems, the book of his I bought was the newest one about his Ozark mother and her quirky, sometimes downright zanny clan.
     
     Most American poets of our generation cut their eye teeth on family poems. Freed from more formal modes of the recent and distant past, we wrote free-verse family poems that came to grips, settled a score, or fondly revealed family traits. McNair's poems in The Lost Child share something with such poems of early adulthood, but they also have a mature canniness, shapeliness, and depth that come only from long practice navigating the undercurrents.

   The slim book begins and ends with poems about his mother's death. In the opening poem he shows us both the shambles of her life alone and her refusal of help:
         ......the bags of unopened mail
.        and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.
..........................................................................
        .....in her don't-need-nobody-
        to-help-me way of walking, with her head

       bent down to her knees as if she were searching
       for a dime that had rolled into a crack...

Then comes the shock of what brings her low:

     ......When the pain in her foot she disclosed
     to no one was so bad she could not stand

    at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff
    to find what was edible....

At first the hospital is a bit like Elysium: "her white room among nurses who brushed/her hair while she looked up at them and smiled..."

This pleasure disappears when her Ozark kin show up, the ones she's known largely through late night phone calls: her "stout, bestroked younger brother...her elderly sister/ and her bald-headed baby brother/
whom she despised." They file into the hospital room, come "all the way/from Missouri."

Her suspicion cuts to the bone:

When it became clear to her that we were
     not her people, the ones she left behind
     in her house, on the radio, in the newspaper

she would not speak. She turned away.


     The relatives plead, then accuse:

    ..........You was always
    the stubborn one. We ain't here to poison you,
    turn around and say something.


     In the last line, the poet show how she snaps shut:

     When she wouldn't.

This is only the beginning of Wes McNair's discovery of his Ozark family.  When he takes her ashes home to be buried, her sister sits talking with him. Her beautiful speech, he will tell me, used "old country expressions like 'a-going,' and 'fixin' to, and 'this-a-way, that-a-way.'" Fictionalizing some, and borrowing some, he brings the Ozark kin to life as if we sat with his favorite aunt and listened to long looping stories, connected by and, and because, and so and when. 

(Part 2 The Family Poem)