Honest Engine Read online

  HONEST ENGINE

  OTHER TITLES BY KYLE DARGAN

  The Listening (University of Georgia Press, 2004)

  Bouquet of Hungers (University of Georgia Press, 2007)

  Logorrhea Dementia (University of Georgia Press, 2010)

  HONEST ENGINE

  poems

  KYLE DARGAN

  © 2015 by the University of Georgia Press

  Athens, Georgia 30602

  www.ugapress.org

  All rights reserved

  Designed by Erin Kirk New

  Set in Garamond Premier Pro and Le Havre

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  permanence and durability of the Committee on

  Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

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  Most University of Georgia Press titles are

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  Printed in the United States of America

  19 18 17 16 15 P 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dargan, Kyle.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Honest engine: poems / Kyle Dargan.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8203-4728-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) —

  ISBN 0-8203-4728-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3604.A74A2 2015

  811′.6—dc23

  2014011857

  ISBN for digital edition: 978-0-8203-4831-5

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  Sooner or later, it all comes crashing down (crashing down), crashing down (crashing down) when everyone’s around.

  ~N.E.R.D.

  SCHEMATIC

  Within the Break: An Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  CYCLE ONE: EQUITY

  State of the Union

  Ownership

  China Syndrome or Slow Ride from Logan to the Heights

  O, Ghost

  States May Sing Their Songs of Praise

  Cormac McCarthy as Translation

  A House Divided

  Two Years from Retirement, My Neighbor Contemplates Canada

  “We / Die Soon”

  CYCLE TWO: JAGGED SERENADE

  Song of the Women and Children

  Suprematist Sweet Nothings

  O, Bride

  Beastheart

  Capture Myopathy

  There Is No Power in Sex

  Nostalgia

  Note Blue or Poem for Eighties Babies

  Dirge in April

  Song of the Men

  CYCLE THREE: CONVERSATIONS WITH SLEEP

  Conversations with Sleep ( I )

  Conversations with Sleep ( II )

  Conversations with Sleep ( III )

  Conversations with Sleep ( IV )

  Conversations with Sleep ( V )

  CYCLE FOUR: ESCHATOLOGY

  It Is Always Dark in Egypt

  Barcode

  The Robots Are Coming

  Fool’s Therapy

  Goliath

  Exit Season

  Words for the Departed

  Charm

  CYCLE FIVE: THE MEDIOCRITY PRINCIPLE

  Context

  Points of Contact

  Call and Response

  Eucharist

  Reverence in the Atomic Age

  Dear Religion

  Man on an Iron Shore

  Art Project

  Mulligan

  None of Us Saints

  Unless Marooned

  Pale Blue Dot

  Notes

  WITHIN THE BREAK: AN AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is the sound of blues breaking

  the broken back together

  ~FRED JOINER

  My previous book, Logorrhea Dementia, ended with the Rapture. This collection begins at a rupturing.

  By age thirty-one, I had never been punched in the face, and I had never broken a bone in my body—this despite being born in an angry city and spending ages eleven through seventeen roving the testosterone-rich halls of an all-boys’ school. While I had lived far from an unchallenging life, I had yet to learn certain things about hurt—significant items were missing from my pain résumé.

  The year prior, my grandmother, Ruth Dargan—who was a constant and influential presence during my childhood—ended her brief battle with cancer. In the best sense, she had lived a long and exhausting life. With all she made from the breaths she took, there was no reason to mourn the breaths she would never draw. I had accepted all that before I walked into her apartment with my father to see her for a final time—seeing being all that was possible given that she was in a medically induced coma. My father told me she could not hear me—though I did not need to be told. We touched her hands, told her we loved her, and then I walked out of the room while my father remained to tend to her linens. I took three steps before I fell against the hall’s wall—having gone from resisting crying to being wracked with tears and retching. It was a pain that my body could not contain, likely because it was not sourced from within my flesh. It was the pain of one pillar of my world crumbling and burying me beneath debris. I would eventually dig myself free and find an altered landscape awaiting me.

  The year following my thirty-first concluded with a succession of losses. First, my aunt, Marie Dargan, suffered, and died from, consecutive heart attacks. Next, my dear friend Marlene Hawthrone suffered a heart attack in Atlanta, though she was only twenty-nine and beginning to blossom. Lastly, and within a week of each other, my college roommate Shegan Rubin was hit and killed by a car fleeing the Newark police and my stepfather’s mother—my last surviving grandmother, Remonia Williams—expired in East Orange General Hospital.

  Amid that flurry of sadness, though my face and body remained unscathed, I began to realize that those deaths were my blows, my thresholds of pain. The bloodied noses and broken collarbones I had yet to receive were befalling me in the guise of losses. At times, I found myself punch-drunk but also reshaped. It was not quite a transformative bout with, say, duende—for I was not calling with abandon for death to come forward and wound me, and even if I were, that would have been a battle with the external, as opposed to duende’s cathartic darkness that one calls forth from within the self. Nonetheless, that “beating” had rendered me common. The sadness of the living—which bombards us from birth—had finally breeched and flooded me, marked me same among men and women. But in becoming a survivor, I found myself traversing a territory of time and space in which each day I would find myself encountering some wrinkle of life, what I know of it, without these figures walking beside me—an absence of their shadows.

  With this personal epoch—when so many of those whose presence buffered, if not disguised, the stark realities of my life are now gone—I am seeing our human dilemma anew and questioning what can I afford to continue believing. With maturation, there is mounting darkness, but I cannot allow it to be all I see.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Versions of these poems first appeared in the following venues:

  Baffler: “The Robots Are Coming”

  Connotation Press: “Dear Religion”

  Copper Nickel: “States May Sing Their Songs of Praise”

  Poets.org (Academy of American Poets): “A House Divided”

  Rattling Wall: “Note Blue or Poem for Eighties Babies”

  Subtropics: “Reverence in the Atomic Age”

  “Note Blue or Poem for Eighties Babies” was also featured online as part of the “Arts and Academe” series from the Chronicle of Higher Education and anthologized in The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary
Poetry.

  “The Robots are Coming” was also anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014.

  “State of the Union” was included in the anthology District Lines, vol. II.

  I would like to thank the following individuals for their support of this book: Sydney Dupre and Beth Snead for adopting and championing the project; Erika Stevens for her sharp eye and publishing guidance; Sandra Beasley for being willing to trade manuscripts as our books came together; Paulette Beete, Hayes Davis, and Melanie Henderson for sharing poems on Sunday mornings on Capitol Hill.

  I would also like to thank the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, the Chinese Writers Association, and the U.S. Department of State for their support of the Life of Discovery program that allowed me to travel to China and engage with some of that nation’s literary artists—which inspired a number of the poems in this collection.

  EQUITY

  STATE OF THE UNION

  I live in a land called East of the River,

  five miles from the U.S. Capitol,

  where air space must still be policed—

  no-fly zone. Tonight, a helicopter freezes

  into a shallow star blinking above my house

  while the men and women of government

  herd themselves inside the Senate chambers—

  our Commander in Chief and all his cabinet

  save one, traditionally one, who is excluded

  and tasked with waiting to resurrect

  our country should Iran, Russia, China, or

  what’s left of Iraq try to bowl a ballistic seven-ten

  split, toppling the Monument and Capitol.

  Tonight, it’s the agriculture secretary’s duty

  to save us. It should always be our agriculture

  secretary. In times of crisis, a country needs—

  before commerce or war or law—to eat,

  and if Congress allowed the appointment

  of an agriculture secretary who can’t grow

  a pea, might we not deserve oblivion?

  I prefer to imagine our Secretary of Agriculture

  hunkered in his undisclosed location,

  listening to the speech on battery-powered radio,

  sifting seed through his dusty palms, deciding

  what must grow first in the aftermath of fire.

  OWNERSHIP

  I wrap home in quotation marks

  when writing of my mother’s

  hulking house in New Jersey

  ever since I signed my name

  to a mortgage for my dwelling

  two-hundred miles south of her.

  I keep the key to my mother’s doors

  on the ring with my office key—

  my two “homes” away from this

  new house. I live in D.C.

  Once, I told my family, No one lives

  in D.C.—Virginia and Maryland, elsewhere.

  Now my territory is the taxpayer’s turf.

  My homeland will ever be my mother’s

  sallow Victorian—I belong to that house

  more than it belongs to me, that house

  a “home” only when I choose to visit her,

  see her. Who sees D.C.? No one—

  so, now I am a no-one living inside

  a brick façade. I tell Aunt Marie

  I’m heading home. New Jersey, she asks.

  No, home not “home.” I could say

  house, but back “home” to house

  means to dominate. Wells Fargo

  actually owns me, my house.

  D.C. claims jurisdiction over the dirt

  where my house rests its bones.

  My mother still owns our “home,”

  while I write checks and post them

  to the bank each month. They send back

  small pieces of my house, which I sow

  in this earth that bears none of our initials.

  CHINA SYNDROME

  or SLOW RIDE FROM LOGAN TO THE HEIGHTS

  ~for Elahe

  In China, the transit coaches ride

  on four legs with wheels for feet,

  straddling any cars gridlocked below.

  That is how my weary mind

  wants to regale you once it’s evident

  we could have hoofed these ten blocks

  faster than traffic will permit this 54 bus

  we squeezed within—finding a seat beside

  a Caucasian girl lecturing an Egyptian man

  about Christopher Columbus. (I mean

  who does that—comes to a country and says

  I own you now? You know?)

  In this moment—a blank-faced Salvadoran

  giving us both the you-hearing-this-shit eye—

  I realize why, of all the odd beauty I saw

  in China, I mainly remember those buses.

  Mere awe: not of the elevated carriages,

  but of the fact that China grew tired of traffic

  and resolved to venture a solution.

  I am no communist [repeat], but I am tired

  of waking vexed in this land of Cialis and picture-

  in-picture-in-picture flat screens. I want

  our American generation to cure something

  major—erase one smudge from humanity’s

  horizon. When did it come to be

  that good ideas only migrate here?

  We used to yank them from our soil.

  No one is looking at us.

  Off the bus, you say that traffic is no major ill,

  but you have never traveled to Beijing—

  you have not seen its sky smogged through

  to an opaque sadness. For you, I would

  describe it, but for now, for argument’s sake,

  I need you to think of China as that broad,

  beautiful place our promise abandoned us for.

  O, GHOST

  O, Ghost, you methane mirage, blue

  burning at the foot of my basement stairs

  ignited nightly by the haunting’s hunt.

  I have read you come hungry—a gullet

  straw-thin, belly like a cavern, you vase

  with limbs. I place cut asters down your throat.

  They fall through you, to the floor. I pour

  rainwater down your throat. It rises.

  You want a Michelob. You want a good fuck

  or some crystalline spark injected through

  your phantom veins, but, Ghost, I am

  the wrong dealer for you. I’ve read

  parables suggesting truth is all you’ll digest

  at this point. I am only a heartbeat,

  a sentient sack of blood who expects

  night will give way to sunlight

  as it has done each day of my life.

  I cannot call that truth. Ghost, I cannot

  feed you, but I’ll tongue a woman wildly

  for you. I’ll feed pints of ale across my lips.

  I’ll rub my nerves raw with recklessness,

  reminded now that this is all we ever were:

  wrecks. Pity all who think they are heavenly

  bodies marooned here on earth. We smolder.

  We expire in trills of smoke. Ghost,

  what arrogance earned you your body

  of cold, ceaseless flame? Were my touch

  so true, I would extinguish you.

  STATES MAY SING THEIR SONGS OF PRAISE

  I imagine each enunciation, each syllable

  pronounced—Mississippi—makes a noose

  cinch somewhere, rope reduced

  to arousal, tightening. The pull,

  the hard-learned feel of vertebrae supple

  within a neck’s column, and marrow’s juice

  sucked clean until what remains are flutes

  of bone, a wind section of rubble.

  Whenever I meet Mississippi in a dream,

  it is always a landfill of labored breaths

  or a gra
nd mammal crippled in morass.

  What did you ever want of us? I ask. It beams,

  The same you want for me—the subtle heft

  of razors beneath the magnolia tongue’s lash.

  CORMAC McCARTHY AS TRANSLATION

  We are in Iowa City reading The Road

  when Xiao Fan gently scolds us—

  You Americans, always worried for,

  always in need of saving, the world.

  Were it not for the fact that I know

  his sense of the American narrative

  is steeped in bootleg Michael Bay

  cinema from a Shanghai back-alley

  contraband cave he’ll drag me inside

  months from now, I would consider

  his critique. Maybe some of wisdom’s

  breath wafts within what he says.

  Maybe he can see us clearly

  —our bald-faced nationhood—

  here against an unadorned middle

  America, our god complex

  so obvious when wreathed with lush

  amber and green stalks. Another

  misconception would that be,

  for there is no such middle America.

  Everywhere—or the need to be

  everywhere—has no middle.

  And, yes, planet America requires

  saving. Maybe that is why our stories

  all begin with the world almost ending

  here. That keeps us up at night, shatters

  our sleep—which Xiao Fan can’t grasp

  because he was never taught

  our Pottery Barn rule: That if you’ve saved it,

  then you’ve broken it. Then it’s yours.

  A HOUSE DIVIDED

  On a railroad car in your America,

  I made the acquaintance of a man

  who sang a lifesong with these lyrics:

  “Do whatever you can / to avoid

  becoming a roofing man.”

  Maybe you would deem his tenor

  elitist, or you would hear him as falling

  off working-class key. He sang

  not from his heart but his pulsing

  imagination, where all roofs are

  sloped like spires and Sequoia tall.

  Who would wish for themselves or another

  such a treacherous climb? In your America,