Two Poems by Robert Wrigley

Machinery 

 

My father loved every kind of machinery,

relished bearings, splines, windings, and cogs,

loved the tolerances between moving parts

and the parts that moved the parts,

the many separate machines of machinery.

Loved the punch, the awl, the ratchet, the pawl.

Infeed and outfeed rollers of the thickness planer,

its cutter head and cutters. The barrel and belt sanders,

the auger, capstan, windlass, and magneto.

Such a beautiful vocabulary in his work, words

he knew even if often he did not know

how they were spelled. Seals, risers, armatures.

Claw, ball-peen, sledge, dead-blow, mallet,

hammers all. Butt, mitered, half-lap,

tongue and groove; mortise and tenon,

biscuit, rabbet, dovetail, and box: all joints.

“A poem is a small (or large) machine

made of words,” said William Carlos Williams.

“Building the machine that makes the machine,”

said Elon Musk. Once my father repaired

a broken harpsichord but could not make it sing.

The chock, the bore, the chisel. He could hang a door,

rebuild an engine. Cylinders, pistons, and rings.

Shafts, crank and cam. Hand-cut notches

where the hinges sat. He loved the primary feathers

on the wings of a duck, extended and catching air,

catching also the tops of the whitecap waves

when it landed. Rods, valves, risers, more seals.

Ailerons and flaps, yaw control in the tail.

Machinery, machinery, machinery, machinery.

Four syllables in two iambic feet. A soft pulse.

Once I told him what Williams said,

he approached what I made with deeper interest

but no more understanding in the end.

The question he did not ask, that would have

embarrassed him to ask, the question I knew

he wanted to ask, the one I was too embarrassed 

to ask for him, was “What does it do?”

Eventually the machine, his body, was broken,

and now it is gone, and the mechanically inclined

machine in his head is also gone,

and most of his tools. The machines that made

the machines are gone too, but for a few

I have kept in remembrance. A fine wood plane

but not the thickness planer, which I would not know

how to use. A variety of clamps I use to clamp

things-needing-clamping clamped. Frost said

poetry is “the sort of thing poets write.” My father

thought it was the sort of thing I wrote,

but what mattered to him was what it did.

What does it do? A widget that resists

conclusions. A crank that turns a wheel

that turns. A declaration of truth

by a human being running at full speed

in a race with no one, toward nowhere

except away from the beginning and toward arrival.

Once my father watched the snow

and noted how landing on the earth it melted.

He said, “It’s snow that doesn’t know it’s rain.”

 

She Said 
 
Friday, English class, seventh grade.
     Nearly everyone alive that day remembers
where they were and will until they die.
     When the intercom announcement came,
we were diagramming sentences, one of the few
     things I understood and was good at in school.
 
We would not know for many years,
     not until the Secret Service man who
covered her body with his own reported
     that the president’s wife spoke to her murdered husband 
in the back seat of a convertible limousine.
     She said, Oh, Jack, what have they done?
 
I wonder if sentence diagramming was over
     for the day at that point, which would have
disappointed me, since I was good at it
     and doing it made me feel smart
and understand certain things—
     the machine, the organism, the symbols of the words
arranged just so, doing what they did.  Everyone
     in that convertible limousine that day
is dead now, except for the Secret Service man.
     He has remembered what she said all of his life since.
 
We stayed in school
     until the final bell then walked or rode
a school bus home. I don’t remember.  But everyone 
     alive then remembers when the man
they said had fired the shots was shot himself,
     two days later, at the Dallas police station.  We watched it
over and over and over on TV.  
     The day after that I saw my father cry
for the only time in my life.  He lay on the sofa,
     watching a state funeral in black and white
between his stockinged feet.  When the band played
     the Navy Hymn, he began to cry.
 
Outside all the leaves had fallen from the trees.
      There were no birds.
The TV announcers explained the symbolism
      of Black Jack, the riderless horse, 
and of the six gray horses pulling the caisson
     that held the casket.  In the post-shooting chaos,
her pink pill-box hat was lost.
 
Someone has that hat.  We don’t know who.  
     A strawberry pink, wool bouche, double-breasted
Chanel suit, she wore it the rest of the day
     as it stiffened with her husband’s blood.        
She said she regretted she’d washed the blood
     from her face before the swearing in of LBJ.
She said she wanted them 
     to see what they had done to Jack.  
 
They had done what
     they had done and my father cried  
and I went outside and walked around  
     and did not climb any trees,
although they offered themselves to me.
     All I did was walk.  There were no birds
anywhere. A cold, late November day.
     I wasn’t wearing a coat 
but didn’t want to go inside,
     until I was sure my father was finished.
It was thought when she climbed
     in her smart suit out onto the trunk lid
of the Lincoln, that she meant to help
     the Secret Service man into the car.
That may have been when she lost her hat.
 
In fact, she climbed out 
     to retrieve a chunk of her husband’s skull.
Sixteen years after she died,
     Agent Clint Hill, who is still alive, 
gave the interview in which he repeated
     what she said—Oh, Jack, what have they done?
He was shielding her body.
     Her hat was gone, her lips 
just touching her dead husband’s ear.
     A sentence.  A rhetorical question.
In the noise and clamor, no one else heard.
 
I’m not sure I knew there was such a thing 
     as a rhetorical question at twelve,
but I could have diagrammed hers.
     The subject is they.  
It would have been placed at the
     left end of a horizontal line and separated
from the verb, have done,
     by a perpendicular line.  On the right, the object,
separated by yet another perpendicular line: what.
     In this way the sentence, 
interrogatory, is turned to a declarative statement:  
     They have done what.
They, third person plural pronoun,
      refers to a group not specifically identified.
What, a relative pronoun, also refers
      to something unstated,
unless it is blood and bone, her husband’s
      exploded head in her lap,
nothing more, and no one else.
    

Robert Wrigley is the author of several books of poetry: The Sinking of Clay City (1979), The Glow (1982) (chapbook), Three broadsides - "The Beliefs of a Horse", "A Preference in Birds", "Surfaces" (1984), Moon in a Mason Jar (1986), In the Dark Pool (1987) (chapbook), What My Father Believed (1991), In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), Reign of Snakes (1999), Clemency (2002) (chapbook), Lives of the Animals (2003), Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin Group, 2006), Beautiful Country (2010), After a Rainstorm (2010), Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (2013), The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (2013, UK), Box (2017), and The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022).

Robert Wrigley has won the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Celia B. Wagner Award, Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award, and five Pushcart Prizes. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. His poems have been widely anthologized, twice included in Best American Poetry, and featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. His poems have been published in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review and other magazines. He is also the author of a collection of personal essays, entitled Nemerov's Door.