Poets on Couches: Mark Wunderlich

In our new series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

“Our Dust”

by C.D. Wright

Issue no. 109 (Winter 1988)

I am your ancestor. You know next-to-nothing

about me.

There is no reason for you to imagine

the rooms I occupied or my heavy hair.

Not the faint vinegar smell of me. Or

the rubbered damp

of Forrest and I coupling on the landing

en route to our detached day.

You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity.

I was the poet

of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch

phone books, of failed

roadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs and

sharpening shops,

jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybelline

factory on the penitentiary road.

A poet of spiderwort and jacks-in-the-pulpit,

hollyhocks against the tool shed.

An unsmiling dark blond.

The one with the trowel in her handbag.

I dug up protected and private things.

That sort, I was.

My graves went undecorated and my churches

abandoned. This wasn’t planned, but practice.

I was the poet of short-tailed cats and yellow line paint.

Of satellite dishes and Peterbilt trucks. Red Man

Chewing Tobacco, Black Cat Fireworks, Triple Hit

Creme Soda. Also of dirt dobbers, nightcrawlers,

martin houses, honey, and whetstones

from the Novaculite Uplift. What remained

of The Uplift.

I had registered dogs 4 sale; rocks, dung,

and straw.

I was a poet of hummingbird hives along with

redheaded stepbrothers.

The poet of good walking shoes—a necessity

in vernacular parts—and push mowers.

The rumor that I was once seen sleeping

in a refrigerator box is false (he was a brother

who hated me).

Nor was I the one lunching at the Governor’s

mansion.

I didn’t work off a grid. Or prime the surface

if I could get off without it. I made

simple music

out of sticks and string. On side B of me,

experimental guitar, night repairs and suppers

such as this.

You could count on me to make a bad situation

worse like putting liquid make-up over

a passion mark.

I never raised your rent. Or anyone else’s by God.

Never said I loved you. The future gave me chills.

I used the medium to say: Arise arise and

come together.

Free your children. Come on everybody. Let’s start

with Baltimore.

Believe me I am not being modest when I

admit my life doesn’t bear repeating. I

agreed to be the poet of one life,

one death alone. I have seen myself

in the black car. I have seen the retreat

of the black car.

 

Mark Wunderlich is author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry, and his poems, interviews, reviews, and translations have appeared in journals such as Slate, The Paris Review, and Poetry, and in more than thirty anthologies.