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.        

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)

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)
     

Margotlog: Crime and Punishment in Chernobyl

Margotlog: Crime and Punishment in Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievich's "Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster"

I bought a copy of Voices from Chernobyl when I read that the author, Svetlana Alexievich had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But eventually, even without this intense spotlight on her achievement, I would have found my way to her book partly because I, too, have created literature out of other "voices"--my oral history memoir of Minnesota's premier Ojibwa artist George Morrison, Turning the Feather Around (MN Historical Press). But also because, every year or so, I read one of the great works of Russian literature. Voices from Chernobyl belongs with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. 

In Jane Austen's miniature world, immense things happen in muted form. Long years of waiting and longing plague Ann Elliot in Persuasion but we hear hardly a peep from her. Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice experiences her comeuppance on a rather small stage. But the works of the Russians invoke wide and troubling distances, uncertainties that drill deep into the psyche, and as in Voices from Chernobyl, a range of experiences that often defy categorization.

The nuclear disaster in Chernobyl made world headlines when it occurred in 1986. The explosion and nuclear fire released radiation so intense that in some locations, it could not be quantified with available instruments. Men with inadequate protective clothing arrived to attempt to contain the fire and the spill of radiation For months and years after, residents near enough to have been affected were offered relocation, butthe true story of Chernobyl was not officially told. Only a softened, hushed version found its way into the press.

One of the rare gifts in Svetlana Alexievich's "Voices of Chernobyl" is to respect the confusion and silencing that characterized the disaster from the beginning. She takes the people she interviews at their word. She does not dispute what they experienced, including what various official agencies told them. Yet, from these 
voices, including many refugees from "Armenia, Georgia, Abkhazia, Tajikistan, Chechnya" who came to live in the homes left by escapees from the disaster, she records the intensity of feelings, their shock and chagrin at finding themselves living in a destroyed world, where the destruction is not always noticeable.

Commenting on her response to these stories, she writes in the afterword, "I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision....The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinates me." (p. 236)

Some of the sections read like choral call and response: "The only time I don't cry is at night. You can't cry about the dead at night....."

"We have the best kind of Communism here--we live like brothers and sisters..."

"The boss-men come, they yell and yell, but we're deaf and mute. We've lived through everything, survived everythng."

"I'm not afraid of anyone--not the dead, not the animals, no one. My son comes in from the city, he gets mad at me. 'Why are you sitting there! What if some looter tries to kill you?' But what would he want from me? There's some pillows..."

"Why did Chernobyl break down? Some people say it was the scientists' fault. They grabbed God by the beard and now he's laughing. But we're the ones who pay for it." (pgs 76-78)

Many other segments are what the author calls monologues: Here's a bit from "Three Monologues about a Homeland"  Lena M.--from Kyrgystan says: "The place we called our homeland doesn't exist, and neither does that time, which also was our motherland....This is our home now. Chernobyl is out home, our motherland. [She smiles suddenly.] The birds here are the same as everywhere. And there's still a Lenin statue....People don't understand. 'Why are you killing your children?'....I'm not killing them. I'm saving them...They fear what they have here in Chernobyl. I don't know about it. It's not part of my memory."

This ultimate awareness of limits, this is one of the most startling elements in these strangely moving, yet unconnected accounts. Add to that, the refusal to be characterized by anything except ongoing life, with its mixture of the bizarre, quiet, hateful, sad, sustaining and unpredictable. 

I read it avidly, quickly. Then, when I'd finished, I wasn't sure what I'd read. Perhaps some other time, I'll start over.

Margotlog: Empty Water

Margotlog: Empty Water

     As the family car drove past the beautiful blue-green lake, the boy wondered why no one was swimming in the lake. Why no ducks or geese paddled its rippling surface. Why no cat tails swayed along its shores.

     "It's the mine," his father said. But the boy saw no mine, or at least no buildings that might cover a mine shaft. Mines were dug deep into the soil, he believed. They went so deep they hit rock which had to be chiseled away. Deeper and deeper went the mine into rock, until it reached coal, when it stopped. Miners wearing headlamps were lowered in rickety elevators far into the ground, there they extracted the coal. When miners and coal came to the surface, the miners' faces looked black as if they'd bathed in coal dust.

     There are mines in Minnesota but not coal mines. I was about to find this out first hand. The day began quietly as I sat in the dark before a huge picture window. I'd brought coffee and notebook to a long table before the window. Slowly as I came awake, the sky brightened. Clouds touched with vermilion lifted into the dark above a gradually brightening layers of blue, red, pink, and gold. The sky was intensely beautiful, and empty except for a crow flying past. Below tte sunrise rippled the huge body of water we call Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world.

     Later I met a fisherman named Sven. By the time I arrived at the solid, spacious fish house, he'd developed a rhythm, lifting a herring from a wet bag, slapping the rather stout silver fish on a cutting board, chopping off its head, slicing down its middle and scooping out its innards. He checked the lungs to make sure they were dark red. If they were white, it meant the fish had been dead too long. Such fish he flipped into another bag. "For the gulls," he said and smiled at me. Outside in the shallow water, gulls called and lifted and settled, pushing against each other, eager to snatch up the discards.

     Once the inedible parts were sliced away, Sven daintily filleted the pink flesh--a surgeon of herring for restaurant patrons up and down the North Shore.

     Sven had a comfortable face gray-bearded face, and easy-going ways. He introduced me to the wide wooden rowboats herring fisherman row out into the lake. There they anchor nets which they check the next day or two. Drawing a length of net into the boat, they toss the herring stuck in the net into pails of lake water, and draw another segment of net forward. Their boats are deep as refrigerators, and curved as melons. Their ribs are stout as oak branches. Sven's grandfather made many in his time. The newest one Sven showed me was still golden in its stout elegance.

     "We couldn't fish for herring when Reserve Mining was still dropping tailings into the lake," Sven recounted. "Herring don't tolerate murky water." Now that the mining has stopped, herring have returned. "They'll never be as many as before," Swen said.

     That's what worries many of us about the newest proposed Poly Met mine near the North Shore of Lake Superior. Poly-Met implies many, poly, metals, met. Poly-Met wants to copper and nickel out of sulfide-containing rock. The water used in the mining operation would be dumped. Lately the Sierra Club estimates that it would take 500 years for natural processes to clean flowing water of sulfide pollution. These waters would include the Boundary Water area and the St. Louis River which runs into Lake Superior, not to mention groundwater, of this highly toxic sulfide pollution. Poly-Met needs state approval to begin this mine.

     Though proponents argue that the mine proposal has passed all kinds of environmental reviews, that it will bring hundreds of jobs to a depressed area of the state, the counter arguments have, in my opinion, far more weight:
     * once Poly-Met (run by a Canadian company) is established, the number of jobs will decrease...
     * Poly-Met will be mining a rock that contains sulfide. Sulfide pollutes water--water deep underground, water in rivers, lakes, streams and in Lake Superior. Sulfide pollution takes hundreds of years to dissipate. It essentially is permanent for any foreseeable future.
     * Such a mine would be an environmental disaster for any location, but this Poly-Met mine would be situated near the St. Louis River which runs into Lake Superior. Its sulfide pollution would seep into ground water which feeds a vast network of lakes and streams and potholes throughout northeastern Minnesota and the contiguous part of Canada. Vast segments of forest and many towns would find the water that makes life possible so polluted that, as Rachel Carson's opening to The Silent Spring foretold, all would be quiet. All birdsong and spring peepers, all children's singing and shouting, all creaking of fisherman's oars, all yelping of wolf pups and snorting of does and stags. Children would develop intestinal trouble, Many would die young. Mothers would abort fetuses. Fathers would find themselves wheezing when they lift something heavy.

     Environmental disaster has only one other name. The surface of it can be quiet, and peaceful, even beautiful. But it is silent because so much that was once alive is now dead.

Please note: If you want to oppose the PolyMet mine, here is a link to take you to a site for that purpose.

            

Thank you for taking action to oppose the proposed PolyMet mine. Please tell your friends and families to also make their voices heard by visiting our comment page or forwarding this email and asking them to click on this link to submit their comments.

 

Sincerely,

Jon Nelson and Kris Wegerson

NMW Co-Chairs

www.nmworg.org

Margotlog: A Certain Slant of Light

Margotlog: A Certain Slant of Light

In third grade, when I couldn't see the board, I got glasses. Suddenly every hair, every whisker on our cat shone. I spied dust on the chalkboard erasers. My mother developed wrinkles.

I needed a pair of eyes, properly adjusted. It was a quintessential transformation, but not permanent, only intermittent. Since then, I go through the days with adequate sight, until a certain slant brings me to a halt.

A few moments ago as I stood at the wide upstairs window onto our backyard, the sun caught fire in the yellowing maple. The yellow gained intensity from a feathery green pine behind it. Higher up, the naked branches of an elm scratched the pale sky. Two jays lighted there, wings ablaze with lapis lazuli.

 A rare lucidity was being made plain.

I am in love with the arrangement of words, and their capacity to bring an imagined world to life, full of motion and clarity. The light falls on a scene, I watch transfixed. Beings flit about, gathering essentials.

Lately I've been listening to an exceptionally fine recording of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett. This is the third time I've enjoyed this very fine book, read by a woman who renders masculine voices brilliantly--from Karenin's brusk, reserved suffering, to Vronsky's rather slapdash encounters with life, to Levin's self-critical, yet often ebullient love for what exists outside himself: people, dogs, the land. I suspect that Tolstoy's women, despite being well differentiated, from shy Kitty to upright, long-suffering Dolly, to Anna herself, are displayed more fully in their actions than in their inner and outer voices.

Yet overall, Anna Karenina is the most illuminating, the most clearly realized piece of literature I've ever encountered. A clear, gentle light opens first this, then more of it, then slight actions, then emotions, strong or submerged, then encounters quiet yet building in intensity, until with a gentle turn of phrase, this scene, this revelation slows, the chapter ends and we begin again.

It is my kind of bliss. Not Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas with their pell-mell, inside-outside word play, not even Emily's quiet exquisite knife-blade. But a world brought into the utmost, unfolding clarity. It makes me shiver and stand and stare, or close my eyes and listen to each breath, each scrape of the pen. 

Margotlog: The Dark Days

Margotlog: The Dark Days

It might as well be November today, October 25--the sky is gray, the trees though still green and gold and brilliant red are silent and no birds sing. In fact, as is usually the case as the season turns, many birds stop coming to our feeders. Even those who remain here all winter, seem less hungry. I read in the paper that this is the time when they change their feathers (like us, changing our wardrobes), and become more quiet.

Yet a few days ago in sun, the feeders were swarming with all kinds of birds--woodpeckers (more about those in a moment), chickadees almost flying into each other to get to the pole feeder with its four sites for food, nuthatches, and finches too, swarming around the long, fat tube feeder with its openwork access to seeds.

We have a new woodpecker, a ladder-back, red-bellied woodpecker. This ladder backed woodpecker has a wide stripe of red all the way from its forehead down the back of its head. It's identified as having a red belly, but I don't see that. This is a big bird, 8 inches to our more common Hairy at 7.5 and Downy, at 5.75. These two frequent woodpeckers, who are almost identical with black and white patterning and red spots at the back of their heads, take turns swooping toward the suet and fruit/nut cakes. The Red Bellied glides more than swoops, and has a softer "chuck"; whereas, the two black and white critters almost caw, they're so loud.

Attitudes toward birds vary so much, from almost complete inattention, to dislike--"they poop on my deck, etc" to my kind of fascination. I like them around, feed and water them, mourn those who die, enjoy using the binoculars to sight a bird in the trees, and on vacation like to identify different birds from those at home--like storks in South Carolina or curved-bill thrashers in Arizona. But I don't want to go on birding trips with "life birders," those people who start life lists and make it a point to check off finding the truly rare ones.

"My" birds are a part of my home, which I've extended into front and back yards with trees and bushes, and bird baths and a growing love of what are disreputably called weeds. To me they are among the most fascinating plants. In fact, this year we've had an array not found before because Fran has stopped mowing. We've let creeping Charlie become our grass, and now, lo and behold, all kinds of plants I've never seen before are cropping up.

Here's one to help me identify--it's low but not too low, maybe grows a foot off the ground. It's leaves are startlingly lobed--not sharp like a maple leave, but long and smooth-edged, like a glove for ten lizard-appendages; the stalks are very prickly, and the flowers are soft yellow and open  like small poppies. When they die, the seed pods that replace them are very prickly. What could this be?

A friend who has kept a beautiful, though very tidy garden for years recently admitted that she's stopped cutting down her dried stalks. "I've heard leaving them is better," she says. She means, I think, that we now understand the crucial interrelation between insects, native plants, birds, and probably native mammals (not, roaming cats!). A friendly family down the street, with a tiny house and two adorable tiny children, recently asked if they could harvest some of my milkweed seeds. Since I planted the boulevard years ago with native plants dug out of an abandoned ox-cart route, I have an ever increasing garden of milkweed, golden-rod, and maybe other plants native to this region. The Wild Golden Glow (in the Rudbekia family) I transplanted to a sunny spot beside the house bloom profusely, and then die back to clacking sticks topped with seed clusters.

Yesterday I watched two chickadees eating the seeds from these spiky clusters. It was a confirmation so moving I had to stop. Slowly, I and others are learning how much better our environment is if we allow as much that is native to the area to remain. Yet I too love the neighbor's monkshood, with its brilliant stalks of deep blue, purse-like flowers. Maybe monkshood is native to Minnesota. I'll have to look it up.