THE WORK

THE POET AS JUNKYARD MECHANIC

By Jayson Iwen

I 

We live on the landfill of history, climbing piles of trash that grow around us with accelerating ferocity, mountains of obsolescence, disposable bottles, cellphones, selfies, plotlines, profiles, hair conditioners, air conditioners, inventories of tragedy, real and imaginary, death and betrayal digitized and discarded in the headlong pursuit of surprise.

It’s hard to tell where the wasteland ends.

Travel till the media seems to dissipate, and you find yourself in a thicket of buckthorn and boxelder broadcast by man, plastic bags flapping in their branches, aluminum cans scattered among their trunks.

Deeper in the thicket, even the old growth grows strangely now, for the very air itself is altered by our effluence.

It’s increasingly difficult to differentiate between human and non, between nature and culture.

Is the buckthorn our descendent?

Is the candy wrapper human?

Does the glance that brings it to mind belong to us or to it?

II

The poet lives at the edge of a town so buried under junk the residents enter their homes through the attic windows.

And she lives at the edge of a storm-ravaged expanse of waste, broken only by other smothered towns and intermittent stands of ancient oak rising through the wreckage.

The poet lives at the edge of everything.

She knows this is where she must be, at the edge of the line, of life and death, of social norms,     the edge of consciousness, the tip of the tongue, where she has lived for millions of years, before even the accumulation began.

From here she never loses sight of the other side.

From here she moves freely in search of the scrap with which she assembles her art.

III

She knows a poem is not a machine but what a machine does, and she knows all machines eventually break down.

Memory machines break and lives are forgotten.

Reason machines break and rumor rules.

Heart machines break and blood pools.

And all these machines run on language, which the poet knows how to fix, so she helps all who come to her in earnest.

Sometimes the speechless in need of speech, sometimes science seeking analogy, sometimes a message in need of feet.

The poet is ever ready with her skills, as long as those who come to her are willing to gaze over the edge with her.

The poet’s secret is the same ancient secret, that every well-made machine produces the same result.

It liberates her audience from oppression.

It engenders a feeling that floods through the end-user, a feeling of freedom from convention, cruelty, neglect, hunger, loneliness and shame, ignorance and ingrained perception, from media supply chains that shackle consciousness.

It gives permission to cry, to feel real anguish, to laugh mad laughter.

The townsfolk come to her for freedom, and she finds it in what they have thrown away.

Rifle becomes flute, dumpster cistern (the endless rains fill), bus becomes wind mill, water pump, green house, home. . .  

IV

She knows a spanner from a scanner, a dewdrop from a tear, a question from a plea, a love from a fear . . . but what are her tools?

First is the sense-enhancing mask she calls “Erebus,” after the primordial deity of darkness, for it magnifies the way darkness magnifies the senses, the way sorrow magnifies the objects of its affection.

With Erebus she scans the wasteland until her attention is caught by something that calls to her, at times as loud as a chainsaw and others as quiet as sunlight on a bell.

Next is “Coeus,” Titan of Questioning, her six-wheeled, all-terrain trawler with mounted crane, with which she closes the distance to what has called her, to be intensely aware of its presence and draw it into her own.

But before retrieval is her laser cutter “Eleos,” Goddess of Mercy and Compassion, with which she takes pity on the material by releasing it from the garbage heap of history, cutting it down to its punctum.

When the material is liberated, she carries it back, cradled in Coeus, to her “Templum,” the pole barn garage where she works and lives.

Templum is her studio, her museum, her gallery, her zone.

Here she contemplates the materials on their sacred, ageless own, divorced of space and time.

And finally, her arc welder.

Sometimes she calls it “Eros,” for with it she relates and unites her materials.

Sometimes she calls it “Lucifer,” for its brightness, and sometimes “Teardrop,”

for wisdom begins in tears.

V

The poet focuses on the end of the growing line of welding seam, where the arc burns bright as a star, and in it she sees the bodies of lovers entwining.

She sees Eve biting into the apple and knowledge bursting behind her eyes.

She sees a burning tear rolling down the fissure between two worlds.

She knows it is more than mere “metaphor.”

The arc is the very nature of language and knowledge and discovery.

It is the burning point of experience passing through us.

When the arc is drawn properly, it passes through every fiber of you, from the eye and ear to the throat, heart, lungs, gut, navel, and groin, to the limbs where its vibrations tingle and touch whatever we touch.

The light of the arc always emanates from the present into the past, casting light and shadow onto memory.

And it emanates from the present into the future, casting light and shadow onto what we imagine there to be.

The arc is the burning edge of the poet’s attention in Templum.

It is the tip of the present, the advancing edge of the line, as the arc proceeds along the seam of the unseen.

It is the first syllable of the sound of the next word coming to her lips.

The arc pierces her like a filament of lightning drawn down through the top of her head to her sex.

The tool becomes more than a machine of language, more than an electrochemical miracle of a brain.

The tool possesses the toolmaker, and another dimension unfolds.

By the light of the arc, the visage of the poet is that of a god looking upon eternity.

VI

After hours laboring in Templum, the poet removes her welding helmet and climbs the ladder to the roof, where she sits on a folding chair between her solar array and cistern, and she watches the stars flicker through the orbiting exospheric trash layer, and she thinks.

Even if the universe comes to an end, something beyond it will persist.

And if there is no end, there can be no end goal, and, with no end goal, no progress, only how we want to live right now.

And if our goal is immortality, and we ever achieve that, there will be no end again and again no goal.

There’s no true end to a thing or a self.

Nothing independent of All.

The poet knows the sky in terms of birds and birds in terms of sky.

The poet knows in her bones this is so.

So she turns her mind again to the sacred tasks of re-pair, re-purpose, and re-member, for the means themselves are the end.

VII

In this endless end, the poet is neither this nor that.

She is alive and dead and speaking to our great grandparents and speaking to our great grandchildren when she speaks to us.

The poet writes the obituaries while others weep.

When she weeps, it is for what they have forgotten.

America often told the poet she was a parasite, but America is bedridden now with self-inflicted wounds, so it is up to the poet to guide the people home.

And when, at last, she herself goes to sleep, she dreams the dreams they were afraid to keep.

Jayson Iwen’s book Roze & Blud won the 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His other books include Dick, Gnarly Wounds, A Momentary Jokebook, and Six Trips in Two Directions. He co-translated Jawdat Fakhreddine’s Lighthouse for the Drowning and Salim Barakat’s Come, Take a Gentle Stab. Jayson lives in the Twin Ports, where he teaches at The University of Wisconsin–Superior.