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
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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
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
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,