Kai Carlson-Wee
Two POEMS
Riding the Highline
At first, there was only the faint sound of sprinklers hitting the tanker near my
head. The cool rush of semi-trucks leaving the valley. The low moon climbing the
trees. And off in the distance, the endless procession of Hanjin
container cars vanishing into the night. I was somewhere near Minot. Hungry.
Dehydrated. Doing my best to approximate the hour by watching the glow
on the distant ties (some thirty miles closer to California) get brighter.
I watched the line. Waiting to feel the drum of the engine, the guttural sound of
the Bull car rounding the higher-priority freight. Maersk. Ying Mang. Piggyback
rides for the shipyard in Oakland. Fords for the dealerships east.
I could feel the cold weight. The muscle of diesel and slack-line beneath me.
Air-brakes shuddering, starting to wheeze. And then, as if finding a hole
in my body, as if turning a handle and opening up a door, the new medication
cut through. The rails went forward and backward at once. I could see
the divided lines, ox-bowing slowly, losing themselves in the haze. How even
the clouds moving over them froze. How they back-tracked and ended up
blending again into darkness. And how, as a boy in my grandparents’ pool,
floating with water-wings, holding my face near the chemical drain in the wall
(because it was safer there, the echoes somehow less exposed), I discovered
a bee’s nest the size of a baseball, small enough to cup in my hand, and thought
it was strange to have built one so close to the water. How the waves didn’t
touch it. How the pool must never get used. The wash of those river-roads,
covered in brightness. Deer bodies rising away from the snow. The mouth
of my grandmother opening, closing. Laughing to cover the loss of a name.
The weight of her memory falling like stones through the wrought-iron grill
of a drain. Rippling lowly. Slow light returning. Mealworms, prairie dogs, dark
knots of garter snakes, small toads snug in the earth. The smell of my father’s
shirt. The smell of the dry florid dust-wind of South Santorini. The towering,
suicidal cliffs of the White Beach. Those breathless prehistoric pillars
of salt-rock. Startling blue of the Mediterranean Sea. Your eyes at the train
station lobby on King Street, kissing me awkwardly once on the forehead
and turning forever away. The letter unfolding. The faint and invisible mist.
The pure soul. I could see the green wheel of time underneath me. It rolled
endlessly over the dark horizon. Into the sheer plains, into the low fields
echoing dawn, breathing the held heat, smolder of dead fish, nitrogen,
hogs ground up in the slaughterhouse plow. It continued in green waves.
Into the one-horse midnight towns. Into the holes in the hearts of mountains.
It became a country. A possible God. And there in ballast, there in the field
beside the train, I could picture my father bent over the first dog we owned,
gone rabid from chewing on batteries, eyes closed and quivering, shaking her
back legs and stiffening. Not from the pain but from something more sweet—
the prairie beginning to size itself up, or the clear unexplainable sound of the sea,
when you hear it as distance behind some hills (the seagulls sit hovering,
tipping their wings just enough so they don’t ever have to come down). At first,
there was only the static of rain, the sprinklers turned on, and the haze of a dream
I was already leaving behind. But then, I could see how the rails combined.
How they joined at the far edge, wound with the wheat rows, truckstop
sprinklers, pallid lot, bricks in the small tiled sign reading: Come Back Soon.
The truckers emerging from claustrophobic mattresses, jaded by landscape,
refusing to stretch themselves out, walking horse-like and lighting the day’s
first smoke. It was all there. Endless. The hands of my grandmother braiding
themselves to the fields—the bruised veins shivering, riding the morphine,
long-haulers chasing the star-cover west. The sediment dust in a vacancy,
pillowcase, blanket stain, antique sideboard—I saw it contained in a similar frame,
extending in soy fields and spray-painted billboards forever. Not to say infinite,
but to go on without it. To endure without knowing there’s anything left.
And my bent father, lifting our dog from her seizure, carrying her over
the wet grass into the backyard, pushing the kitchen knife through. The certain,
appropriate action. Now hard to remember completely. The motion-light
bleaching the roof of the garage, the sight of his boots moving over the lawn,
the walnut leaves hanging indifferent as stars. The slow-motion focus. The lack
of a sound. I remember the terry cloth waving alone on the railing. The fly still
inside it. The frayed edge. The small undramatic collection of blood. And my father
alone in the backyard digging, saying nothing, believing he did something good.
North Shore Recovery
There’s nothing to see here. Only the faint red
tower light blinking. A series of hoof-prints
dissolving in trees. Clouds curl up in the heat of my breathing
and a man on a snowmobile glides through the darkness,
carving the shore on the far other side
of the lake. Wrapped in a thick coat, black-tinted helmet,
what is he searching those distances for?
Where is he going with so much
intention? Gunning the belt over wind-drifts
and ditch-berms, riding alone through the cattail patches
and emptied-out sloughs of the night.
The birds have quit feeding. The squirrels are somewhere asleep
in their rotted-out holes. The moon lets the stars
do the bulk of the shining, and wind sidles down in the crowns
of the pines. I imagine the fear
in the cold hearts of muskies, slowed to a suicide pace
at the springs. Hearing the grind of that overhead engine.
Staring up once in a while at cracks
where a small strip of brightness comes through.
Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL (BOA Editions, 2018). He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and his work appears in Ploughshares, Best New Poets, New England Review, Gulf Coast, and The Missouri Review, which awarded him the 2013 Editor’s Prize. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine and his poetry film, Riding the Highline, received jury awards at the 2015 Napa Valley Film Festival and the 2016 Arizona International Film Festival. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.