Vox Populi
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Al Maginnes: The Body’s Cartographer
Since surgery I inventory each tiny stitch
of discomfort, telegrams arriving from outposts
of wrist, ankle, neck. They come like whispers,
hiss me out of the sleepwalk of daily motion.
Shocked, I stop, an island in a stream of walkers,
flow and draft of birds above us, winged
harbingers swirling the atmosphere while
I gauge this new uprising in the flesh. When
I hurt my knee, stumbling over a teammate while we
played grabass before practice my limb was
green enough to heal after a few days shuffling.
I’ve been lucky enough to steer clear of pain that squats
like the friend you no longer like but can’t evict
from your couch because he’s out of work, but able
to be drunk every day you walk in the door.
When Larry McBride pulled out of a line of stalled cars,
taking a blind curve in the wrong lane, we screamed
blood and jagged steel, goddamning him till he swung
back in the proper lane. We all breathed the deepest breath
possible. That night a few of us got high and recalled
a game we used to play: “Would you rather drown or burn
to death?” “Would you rather be shot or have your head
cut off with a guillotine?” We found pros and cons
for each one, but none of us wanted to die
in a car steered by an apprentice maniac.
I was poor and uninsured, so I set my own broken nose,
bandaged a broken bone in my hand with duct tape
till it stopped hurting. I walked from a couple of wrecked cars.
Once I went back to visit and the search for weed took us
to McBride’s house where that car he had driven squatted
on cinderblocks, hood gaping, engine gone now, metal
reclaimed by earth on rusty flake at a time,
finally the ruin we’d envisioned a few years before.
That curve still tilts in front of me, escape I had nothing
to do with. So when I feel a twinge in the back, a groan
in the shoulders, I chart how close it is to the last place
that hurt, cartographer of my own body. Tonight, in the absence
of pain, I am sure of its return. And I feel a confidence
I don’t deserve that says I may not always skate clean,
but this time and the next, I might avoid the hidden wreckage.
Copyright 2024 Al Maginnes
Al Maginnes has published poems in Poetry (Chicago), Georgia Review and Plume. His many books include Fellow Survivors, New and Selected. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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good one
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A good one. Hopeful. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Al.
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Thanx Rex
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Yes.
“And I feel a confidence
I don’t deserve that says I may not always skate clean,
but this time and the next, I might avoid the hidden wreckage.”
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What a poem!
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Thanks, Al x (Though now I’m re-charting the Rice terrain!)
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Wonderful poem, Al, and thanks for featuring it, Vox. Those who’ve spent if not mis-spent youth long ago are likewise cartographers of the body, which bears the past in scars and present pain. The poem opens with a great direct line that drew me right in and meanders through memories–I love Larry McBride’s name popping–and always connects memory to body. May we all “skate clean,” a verb I love!
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Thanks, Mary.
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Third try to leave a comment: you provide a new perspective. Raging against aging, but oh the many times I could have bitten the dust! ( also cliche-ing)
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Third try is the charm! Thanks, Barbara.
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Had to go to WordPress because Jetpack didn’t work
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Such a good poem, Al. Thanks, Vox Populi for featuring it. It starts with such arresting images, and proceeds in narrating the terrible and terrifying—but in an understated, rambling, amiable way that is quite disarming.
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Lovely comment, Maura. Thank you!
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Thanks, Al. Good work indeed. Rings so true.
Allen Stein
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Yay Al! I love the poem! I think Agriculture changed my parameters of mishap, held me out of that sordid world beyond fence strands and ditches, and kept me maladjusted and shy in bucolic isolation.
I missed a lot, could’ve had a much better time with you guys!
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I love your enthusiasm, Sean!
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