Wesley McNair's The Lost Child, Part 2 (of 3)

Wesley McNair’s The Lost Child, Part 2 (of 3)

     There are many ways to be an outsider. In an email McNair wrote how, when he took his mother’s ashes to the Ozarks, he renewed his friendship with his mother’s sister. “She talked on and on in the lamplight with her beautiful country accent…using these long, unfolding sentences…as if the sentences…were timeless and could contain anything.”

     These sentences, Wes explained, become the long, looping medium of The Lost Child's second section filled with family poems and titled like the book. Describing for example, an annual Fourth of July reunion, he hears “husbands…making wisecracks at each other” as they watch Chip’s second wife Donna, sitting “near the tubs with her empties.” The men imagine she might turn out like her mother who’d “gone to partying and alcohol,” but as they all knew,

     …………..in families there were things

     you didn’t say to a person, storing them up

  

     from phone calls or visits one-on-one where you first

     heard them, while confessing something in confidence

     which got spread until everyone knew your story too.

       (“The American Flag Cake” p. 36)

Now I am back on the Niangua River, watching for riffles made by stones just below the surface, still not knowing if I’d seen a “shy poke,”

         

     McNair’s narrative poems, constructed of these long lines grouped in five, six, or seven-line stanzas, read like the swift shifts and nuances of conversation. Talk is the family’s medium, showing off glinting, weaving alliances, and the sudden isolation that sends us toward loss and death.

     One of my favorite poems in this long, middle section is “The Run Down 17 Into Phoenix.” Its underlying story is simple and part fictional as the poet says of all these poems: Even with her new house in Amarillo, Texas, Jo-Lynn starts missing her husband Floyd on his long-distance trucker runs toward Phoenix. Her new home feels empty. Even surrounded by life-size, inflatable bears doesn’t keep her teeth from chattering as they used to when her first marriage went belly up. Sympathetic, Floyd's teeth rattle too, but he still can’t help being proud of the time he’s making to Phoenix, driving in the dark.

     Halfway through these long looping poems, Ruth reappears as the outsider sister, determined to go her own way. She full of delusions that sometimes sweep her up into an end-of-the-world “rapture,” and sometimes gnaw at her, making her justify her lonely obsessions. When Ruth’s sister Mae calls  “…to offer comfort on Ruth’s/ first night in the nursing home,” Ruth doesn’t know who she is. And Mae

    then listened to the distant voices

    of the commercials on tv, while Ruth thought about

    husbands and sisters and women getting cleaner counters

    and kitchen floors. “The only one who’s still alive,”

     Mae added, then wished she hadn’t, because

     It made her think of how useless and dead she felt

     In that moment as the family helper....

        

(End of Part 2 of 3)