Dargan - Honest engine: poems

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)

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

Printed and bound by Sheridan Books

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

Most University of Georgia Press titles are

available from popular e-book vendors.

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

811.6dc23

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 everyones around.
~N.E.R.D.

SCHEMATIC

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 bodythis 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 hurtsignificant items were missing from my pain rsum.

The year prior, my grandmother, Ruth Darganwho was a constant and influential presence during my childhoodended 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 timeseeing being all that was possible given that she was in a medically induced coma. My father told me she could not hear methough 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 halls wallhaving 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 stepfathers mothermy last surviving grandmother, Remonia Williamsexpired 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, duendefor 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 duendes cathartic darkness that one calls forth from within the self. Nonetheless, that beating had rendered me common. The sadness of the livingwhich bombards us from birthhad 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 mean absence of their shadows.

With this personal epochwhen so many of those whose presence buffered, if not disguised, the stark realities of my life are now goneI 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.

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 Iowas 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 nations literary artistswhich inspired a number of the poems in this collection.

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
whats left of Iraq try to bowl a ballistic seven-ten

split, toppling the Monument and Capitol.
Tonight, its the agriculture secretarys duty
to save us. It should always be our agriculture

secretary. In times of crisis, a country needs
before commerce or war or lawto eat,

and if Congress allowed the appointment
of an agriculture secretary who cant grow