Search and Rescue

Poems

Michael Chitwood

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807167373
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Search and Rescue, Michael Chitwood seeks what the pagan Celts called the thin places, the spots where otherworldliness bleeds into the everyday. Beginning with childhood, the poet meditates on the intersection of the sacred and secular, on those luminous moments we can only partially understand. Water anchors the collection with the title poem, which explores the history of a large manmade lake and how it changes the surrounding mountain community. Displaying keen narrative skills and an engaging voice, the poems in Search and Rescue pay homage to Whitman and Dickinson, to Heaney and Wright, in pursuit of the everyday grace of Appalachian culture and the natural landscape.

Differently

Catalytic Converter

When he was a boy, he rode with his father to a garage, really just a wooden shed. His father’s new truck needed some kind of repair. The mechanic, a man in a dirty T-shirt and jeans that he kept tugging up under his belly, worked for cash. The boy heard his Dad tell his Mom that he would need cash. It was something about the exhaust.

The shed’s floor was concrete, stained by oil so that it looked like a flat map of the world, all the blotches like continents. While he worked, the mechanic told a story about his dog, which had limped out of the shed and gone around back when they first arrived. The mechanic said the dog had been running off, chasing after bitches in heat. His father didn’t use words like that. “So,” the mechanic said, “I took the top of a tin can and cut his balls off. That fixed it.”

The sound of the phrase “top of a tin can” lodged in the boy. The world leapt up from the stained floor, jagged, shiny, sharp, and populated by men such as this.

Chicken

He cradles the chicken with his right arm, holding it nested against his midsection. He takes a booth and puts the chicken beside him on the bench seat. The chicken settles, its feet disappearing under the billow of feathers. Everyone is trying not to be seen looking.

The waitress pours a glass of water but then sits it on the counter and pushes through swinging doors to the kitchen. After a moment, a man wearing a white paper hat comes back through the doors and goes over to the booth.

“You’ll have to take that outside,” the paper hat man says.

“What?” the man in the booth asks.

“You know what. The chicken.”

“Why? Don’t you serve chicken here?” The man smiles.

“We can’t have a live chicken in here.”

“So only if it’s dead?”

“You know what I mean.”

“So if I kill it we can stay?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The feathers. The feet. There are regulations.”

“Against feathers?”

“Look, it’s a hazard.”

“A chicken is a hazard?”

The paper hat man puts his hands on his hips. His head makes a quick, short thrust forward, not unlike a chicken.

“If it were a dog, could we stay?”

“Only if you were blind.”

“If I were blind, a dog would not be a hazard?”

“The dog helps blind people.”

“The chicken helps me. It keeps me calm.”

“How does a chicken keep you calm?”

“Because it’s calm. See.” The man opens his hand palm up toward the chicken, which sits in a stately roosting posture.

The paper hat man says, “Sorry. You still have to take it outside.”

“Then what?”

“Whatever. Put it in your car.”

“I walked here.”

“I’ll get you a box to put it in while you eat.”

“It doesn’t like confined spaces. And I would get nervous without it. I told you. It keeps me calm. It’s my counterweight.”

“Your what?”

“My counterweight. I have it to take care of and that takes care of me.”

“Are you on medications?”

“Medications didn’t work. That’s why I have the chicken. It’s alive.”

“That’s the problem.”

“No, that’s the solution.”

“Look, I’ve got a job to do. I can’t keep arguing. The chicken has to go.”

“Because it’s alive?”

“Yes.”

The man looks around at the other patrons, who find their food or their silverware very interesting.

The man gathers the chicken in his arms. The chicken is amenable to being gathered. At the door, the man turns and says to all, “Goodbye. I thank you for your kind attention. It is the most that can be hoped for.”

Driving School

“This is not your typical driving school,” the instructor says. No moonlighting state trooper he. He is slim in tan corduroys, a black turtleneck, and houndstooth sport coat.

“We,” he says though he is the sole instructor, “will model only correct behavior. For the classroom portion of the school, there will be no films of fender benders, no speeding, no weaving in traffic, no drunken swerving and definitely, definitely no horrific crashes with rollovers and bodies flying from cars.”

With that, he dims the lights and clicks a rickety old projector that clatters with the film snaking on the sprockets. Lord, who knew these things were still around. If the bulb blew where would you find a replacement?

There’s a flicker of shadows on the screen and then an ancient station wagon appears. We watch it from the rear as it makes its way along the streets of a small town. It passes a house where a man and boy are pitching a baseball back and forth. The boy’s glove is too big for him. One hand is in the oversized glove and he supports it with the other. It isn’t clear whether the glove is a help or hindrance to his catching.

Brake lights flash and the wagon rolls to a gentle stop at a red light, though it is gray in this black-and-white film. “Notice,” the instructor says, “how the driver gradually slowed and came to a controlled stop.”

After a bit, the bottom globe of the traffic signal illuminates, the one we know to be green, though here it is the same color as the red, and the wagon, with its wood side panels, makes a left turn. Its left-turn indicator had flashed all during the stop.

“Make clear your intentions,” the instructor says as the car leaves town and begins passing open fields and wooded patches.

The driver, the father, is obeying the posted speed limit, the instructor points out. The wagon is serenely keeping to its lane, never crossing the center line or running onto the shoulder.

“You see here,” the instructor says—he points toward the screen with his slender index finger—“a driver who is maintaining control of his vehicle at all times. That is the goal of all drivers,” he adds.

“Snacks,” the instruc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Scenes from the Knee-High Gospel
• Water Ways
• Differently
• Others’ Belongings
• Strange and Flashing Lights