Gun/Shy

Jim Daniels, Jim Daniels

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780814348789
• eBook ISBN: 9780814348796
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Poems that seek stability in family and community while coping with a country full of conflict and change.

The poems in Gun/Shy deal with the emotional weight of making do. Tinged with both the regrets and wisdom of aging, Jim Daniels's poems measure the wages of love in a changing world with its vanishing currency. He explores the effects of family work—putting children to bed, leading parents to their final resting places—and what is lost and gained in those exertions. Childhood and adolescence are examined, through both looking back on his own childhood and on that of his children. While his personal death count rises, Daniels reflects on his own mortality. He finds solace in small miracles—his mother stretching the budget to feed five children with "hamburger surprise" and potato skins, his children collecting stones and crabapples as if they were gold coins.

Daniels, as he always has, carries the anchor of Detroit with him, the weight both a comfort and a burden. He explores race, white privilege, and factory work. Eight Mile Road, a fraught border, pulses with division, and the echoes of music, singing through Detroit's soiled but solid heart, resonate in these poems. His first long poem in many years, "Gun/Shy, " centers the book. Through the personas of several characters, Daniels dives into America's gun culture and the violent gulf between the fearful and the feared.

Throughout, he seeks connection in likely and unlikely places: a river rising after spring rain and searchlights crossing the night sky. Comets and cloudy skies. Cement ponds and the Garden of Eden. Adolescence and death. Wounds physical and psychic. Disguises and more disguises. These are the myths we memorize to help us sleep at night, those that keep us awake and trembling. Daniels's accessible language, subtlety, and deftness make this collection one that belongs on every poetry reader's shelf.

1

Hamburger Surprise

SUNDAY BEST

Something men did. Taught their sons. Made a mess.

Newspaper spread on the kitchen floor. Pale green

tile swirled with white and black, camouflage

for spills and stains. The tins of Shinola, the brushes,

the polishing rage. Rags. Rage. Walls cigarette-

yellow. The religion of blending in, passed down

by generations who performed with robotic clarity

to an audience of auto parts, who punched time clocks

and drove home and scrubbed up and slept

or stayed out and drank and either way punched

in again the next day. Applying the polish, rubbing it in,

buffing one shoe, the other. For Sunday. God’s strange

ideas about purity involved the distinction between

shit and Shinola. Shoes for the Church of No Fun.

God wore a fedora and docked your pay, since time

told no lies. Our father, who art polishing his shoes,

one hand in a shoe, the other on a brush. The slashing

slap against it, he taught us—satisfying in a way

that did not involve fists. Four boys waiting our turns

at the polish tin. A shine we could see in lieu of shame.

Shame-ola. Looking down, like we always did.

His were steel-toed, cheap from the plant store.

You couldn’t tell unless you stepped on them.

You’d think they’d last forever, and you’d be right.

My grandfather unscrewed spikes off golf shoes

he found at Goodwill to wear on special occasions.

You’d forget until he put his feet up. I wore down

football spikes dragging them over cement

riding my bike home from practice to send up sparks.

Can you see me back then, uncamouflaged in dim light

in front of the high school? Spark-ola. Polish-smeared

newsprint—want ads, obits, the funnies. I’ve lost

my way, my black tracks. One year we got plastic shoes

from Goodwill, or St. Vincent de Paul, or Salvation Army,

my memory smeared by camouflage. You can’t

polish plastic shoes, we learned as it smeared

like sin on the surface. Nothing could penetrate—

just scratch and scuff. Polish marred the tile floors

of church that day we wore them, shuffling past

the holy water and slumping into a long empty row

near the back, as always. On our way out, we saw

the streaks we’d made. We pretended it was always

that way, which is as good a camouflage as anything.

My Mother at the Sewing Machine

hums through drifting motes

of dim-light dust through

basement window wells,

and the odd magic of us alone

together—daytime, weekday.

Sick, I shiver with fevered clarity.

She is sewing arrows on a scout uniform.

She is rustling pinned patterned fabric

through the machine for my sister’s dress.

She is she is she is: bobbin spin, needle thread

and the near-invisible orange suck

on her cigarette while her hands run fabric.

She is sewing inches of jeans from one

ruined pair onto the blown-out knees

of another. Four boys—the jeans must last.

My mother at the sewing machine

in cold basement light where I lie

on the itchy sponge of an old sofa

watching my deaf grandmother’s

tiny TV with the sound off

while upstairs she shuffles into idle.

My mother stuck between us

threads another needle.

In that quiet glow,

I could be sick for weeks.

STUFFING THE BIRDS, CARNEGIE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

I zigzagged the double stroller up the handicap ramp

and into the elevator to the third floor where birds posed

in permanent peace, forever on the verge of flight. I let

the children loose, the waxed tile floor echoing winter boots

as they stumbled forward, hooting bird calls from distant planets,

arms willfully flapping. Dusty dioramas, relegated to a remote

corridor, while a floor below us, children lined up to scream

at computerized dinosaurs. Time kicked back while my children

smudged glass, ignoring names, habitats, migration patterns.

My son learned to whistle, my daughter learned to snap her fingers,

but the birds stood still. Leaning between vulture and eagle,

I envied my children’s ability to fill silence with b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Unwritten Laws of Gravitational Isolation
• 1. Hamburger Surprise
• 2. Street View
• 3. Gun/Shy
• 4. Leaving the Piano Behind
• 5. The Grand Design
• Acknowledgments