Margotlog: Wesley McNair's The Lost Child (Part 3 of 3) Reading the Riffles

Wesley McNair’s The Lost Child (Part 3 of 3)

Reading the Riffles

     It helps me understand the skill and insight Wesley McNair brings to interpreting his mother’s aging and dying to remember how the Niangua rolled before us in a constant, challenging glimmer.

   For as his mother tries to renew her connection to every object bagged up during her stay in the hospital, she keeps inventing motives and miracles happening around her,

           …as if when she examines

           each rescued object…..

           the past suddenly becomes the present

           and time has not happened to her at all…(“The Abduction”)

Later, as she lies dying in the hospital, the anger and hurt she vented on him as a child now, he understands, has prepared him for “the shock

        Of this final unbelievable loneliness…..

        …………..And never mind

        her lifelong anger, and all the failures

        of the heart…………

he can reach her now only “through her favorite song

        he sang as a boy to lift the grief from her face," The Tennessee Waltz. (“Dancing in Tennessee”)

In the very act of bringing home her ashes, he discovers again “the scar of/ her rejection and hurt”

       disappearing into her work, then and in all

       the years afterward…

Yet the river of her family affection carries him along, with an occasional scrape—her brother calls her a damn Yankee.” He joins them in lifting her soft ashes in their hands,

       ……………each of them speaking

       to my mother in a soft casual way as if

       she stood there beside them…

 And because this binds him to them, and because together they have brought her finally home,

     “she would never, ever again, be gone.” ("Why I Carried My Mother’s Ashes").

     In this book of humorous and humane, angry and revelatory poems, Wesley McNair renders his mother's anger, and confusion, her stubborn, yet elated growing old, and the twining stories of her siblings who second-guess each other, hide truths from themselves and at times embrace love and persistence. Thus, he helps remind us of our own riffles and fear, what we hide from ourselves and what will ultimately puncture our certainty, even as we find joy in living to navigate at all.