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Wes
Barely thirty, crewcut, just back from his stint
in the Navy, his thin arms dangling from a flowered shirt,
my cousin Wes stood on the roof of his trailer, reefing up
on the long, silver aerial of a citizen band radio he hoped
would reach beyond the truckers, far out into the night.
He was still a boy, really, painting houses with his dad.
This was Maple Valley, away on the wet, tangled side
we rarely went to. What was left of Wes's latest Buick lay
rusting in his yard, just down the road from the ramshackle house
where Uncle Sam and Auntie Esther still went about their lives,
snoring among the mason jars and the piles of moldy papers.
I scarcely knew how easily I'd been taught to disapprove.
It's true there'd been no obvious attentions when I stayed
there long ago, only sunstruck fields and burgeoning vines,
blackberries brimming the coffee cans. No single moment
has remained entirely clear, only Auntie Esther, smiling,
hunching over her crutches, behind her a dusty light.
But I am imagining now a gradual softening and fading
until every random object has melted into high, wet grass
or been lost among the blending branches of alder and fir.
I am imagining what passed through my cousin's mind
when the high, silver whip of that waving antenna finally slashed
across the power line, a hundred thousand volts suddenly arcing,
in an instant, through his long, thin arms, his flowered shirt.
What else could he have hoped for, except to reach the others,
except to find the other voices no longer far away?
Chris Anderson
* * *
At Elsie's Grave
The banks of Elsie's open grave were sheathed in walls
of fiberglass, like a tipped-over shower stall, the coffin
racked above it, waiting to be slotted, plain as any product.
But the leaves were already turning, the air was brisk and sweet.
The graveyard rose among the neighborhoods, a glimpse of green,
its driveway then like all the driveways, full of minivans and Camrys,
as if the dead are neighbors, too, these are people we know.
And we were standing on the slope of the hill, tilted to the right,
me at the head of the grave, intoning the prayers, bracing myself
against the pull, the family on the other side, leaning left or lowering
themselves into folding chairs so wobbly all I could think of was tumbling--
all of us tumbling, ass-over-tea-kettle, astonished at first but increasingly
delighted, laughing as we pick up speed, up over the wall and out
into traffic, bouncing and spinning before the hurrying wheels
like enormous, fluffy balls.
Chris Anderson
* * *
about the poems:
"'Elsie" is a poem about an experience I had as a deacon doing a
graveside service several years ago. The cemetery was on the side
of such a steep hill that I worried some of the older people would
fall. But there was this joy that I felt somehow, inexplicably,
this exuberance, and suddenly, as I stood there, I had an image of
all of us falling and rolling and how wonderful that could be.
'Wes' is a poem that came to me when I had the flu. Normally I
can't write unless I feel good physically and otherwise, but
somehow in my feverish state I started thinking about this cousin
of mine, a man who had died in the way I described, electrocuted.
And then I just sort of started detailing the story out, not
worrying about lines, layering and layering the poem.
The 'Elsie' poem just came out, whole. This one I built up."
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