Poetry / Ross White
:: Multifunction ::
Let us celebrate designs which yielded sofabeds, printer/scanners, reversible jackets, sporks, all the ideas hatched to serve two masters with a single motion, every item rolling off an assembly line to replace two others. The modern condition won’t allow us to merely do one thing well. A great third grade teacher will soon be plucked from the classroom and tasked to be principal, because inspiring students to trace a hand and discover in its outline a turkey obviously means you’re a candidate for budgeting and facilities management. Doctors end up running the hospital, inmates the asylum. And some do it beautifully, find the soft skills were there all along like tines hidden in the smooth bowl of spoon. Others manage just well enough not to cock it up. But what of the sad sacks who can’t adjust to spreadsheets, who sit in Monday staff meetings numb, who dream only of dioramas or laparotomies or the quiet padding of a cell? Kiss released “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” in May of ’79, four earnest guys in face paint proclaiming a single function was plenty. I know Paul Stanley sang the lead but imagine those words rolling off a tongue as long as Gene Simmons’s. You could stretch the phrase until it became tension wire. You could send a funambulist across carrying his pole. While he’s up there, he’s only got to focus on one thing. That’s the whole point of the tightrope act. But Kiss fans hated that song. They hated the whole album—ironically, because Kiss was folding disco in to their hard rock sound. There’s the rub: you won’t survive unless you grow, but no one wants to have to watch. Of course there will be fumbles, failures. What foal ever stood without stumbling? Which painters covered their early canvases in perfect brushstrokes? You’re just supposed to botch it and biff it and bollocks it and blow it and bungle it and butcher it in private. Get a room. Rent a studio. Ascend the stairs to a remote corner of a clock tower. Build a hideaway, a hush-hush lab, a shed not far from the edge of the woods. Head to the basement. Perfect it in secret. No one wants to see how the sausage is made. Pretend you left the factory as handy as the new sofa sleeper or North Face puffer jacket. Knife, scissors, corkscrew, ruler, bottle opener all in a handy red sheath. What grace. Not me. I’m backstage staring into the vanity before the big show but none of the facepaint glows me up. I’m the colt who wishes he was back in the womb, the paint brush that would rather just soak in water. I’ve spent mornings behind the principal’s desk at a failing school, dreaming of picture books and cotton ball snowmen on paper plates. I’ve spent afternoons blundering in boardrooms, wishing I could sew a single stitch. I’m in therapy, being asked to love myself. It’s a lot to ask. I was made for lovin’ you.
:: Daybreak: This Could Be My Year ::
I lay my tongue over the morning. Through every vein, glistening berries ripen—platelets singing hallelujah, ready to close the wound if new day cuts too close. Dew leaves the blades of grass as if in rapture. I steel myself to return to stardust but perhaps the creek won’t rise today, as it hasn’t so many days before. Maybe deer darting from the yard will stall and stare me in the living eye again.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I think all the time about this lyric from “Jack & Diane,” the song that was omnipresent in 1982: “Oh yeah, life goes on / long after the thrill of living is gone.” I have, for years, assumed that the tone was mournful, that “Jack & Diane” was a depiction of the kinds of kids for whom high school would be the apex of their lives. Recently, I learned that Mellencamp said, “It has the spirit of people who think that the sun rises and sets with them, and the world is here for them, which it actually is.” That last part is so critical. The world is actually here for them. It’s here for all of us, while it’s thrilling and long after. I’d been thinking of poems as either celebrations or laments. They’re so often both.
Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He is Director of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to tiny, delightful collections.