Michael Lauchlan’s poems have appeared in many publications and have been anthologized in Abandon Automobile (Wayne State University Press, 2001) and A Mind Apart. His earlier collections are And the Business Goes to Pieces and Sudden Parade.
Lauchlan lives and teaches in the Detroit area.
It was the month of wildfires in the year
of heat. It was the summer of baseball
and the year they returned from Spain–
the fascists–from Italy and Chile, from Germany,
from the thirties, the seventies, from wherever
they are stored between times, perhaps
with bacteria in our small intestines,
with mitochondria in every cell. These
were weeks devoted to hating outsiders.
Through my granddaughters’ and my grandson’s summer,
a demagogue rang and Venezuelans slugged
long homers for the home team
while mothers in Caracas faced bullets
and looted groceries. Things made no sense
to us, but things never seem to mind.
It was the month wildfires swallowed
the west, while fireflies lit up
my darkening yard and, against dusk,
distant poplars bristled in a wind
like throngs of people boarding boats
and waving toward us one last time.
(featured in Tar River Poetry)
Between what is and what will come,
we read Ajax aloud–the old, dazed,
blood-spattered grief, the shame lit
in a day’s new light. A young man,
blinking through his glasses, shapes
the wail a hero makes when he learns
what madness and a deity have wrought
in his riven home. The light of a warm
November fills the classroom. Windows
frame red and gold leaves on half-bare
oaks. Again, Tecmessa covers the body.
Again, a brother demands funeral rites,
a grave, some way to restore
one sundered in a shattered land.
(featured in Crab Creek Review)
When the bats came through their end
of St. Francis Home, where one boy
playing an endless game of eight ball
raised a cue before I could speak
and plucked the bat from the air,
he turned a quick, nearly invisible thing
into a falling towel, into a small mophead
dropping from a hook with a dull thud,
into a folded leathery lump to be scooped
with a dustpan into whatever can was close.
The game might be going on still,
rack by rack, unless he finally snapped and lifted
a cue ball right into the face of some
later, meaner version of me. Or the boy
might have sunk into his own hollow chest
and been lowered, maybe with taps and flag,
maybe in a cheap box with no one at all
standing sadly by, and his last thoughts
–as thought arcs backward toward a ground–
might have leapt to a gray, falling form.
(featured in The Louisville Review)
for a writers’ group, I fidget
in a molded plastic seat.
Wait-listed to get inside a place
everyone wants to leave, I stare
across the room at a thin woman,
who’s brushed her long hair,
put on her best blouse and driven
fifty miles. Now she perches
on a blue chair, waiting to get
patted and probed, to walk through
glass doors that hum open
and close again. I smile at her
like the vacant fool I am.
A middle-aged couple emerges
from the sliding doors. They ask
questions at the desk, then huddle
together conferring. A prisoner rolls
a mop-bucket into the john.
Everything is quite routine.
Men in our group spend decades
waiting out parole boards.
A name is called and the lithe woman
strides toward the barrier.
I’m watching. I’m not watching. I’m
reading. I’m checking the clock.
Almost an hour now. Locked up
as a teen, a man in our group
has been inside one hundred
ninety two thousand seven
hundred and twenty hours.
The couple sidles toward an exit
after an hour with a boy
who once ran the point
on his eighth grade team.
(featured in Poet Lore)
In the gym we’re all bodies, young
and shapely or older, adiposed,
rolling over waistbands through
taut shirts that advertise bars
and past years of beer league
softball. But these, love,
don’t answer to our touch
or stretch out alongside, known,
familial, somehow possessed.
During today’s loud regimen
on the line of treadmills, not
a single sweating skin-cell retains,
vestigial, my August football drills.
Sliding across the parking lot,
none of these feet recalled
your frozen college commutes,
loafers soaked as you stamped,
shifted, shook at a bus stop.
Our bodies are libraries, the real
histories we don’t forget, a flinch
we can’t mask (though threats
lie cold in cold earth) a scar,
a knob where none should be.
Even our tears, called by what
sweetness–some loopy, kind
student who knew chivalry, code
and etymology, how it came
from a pack horse, a beast,
a body carrying bodies, this first
non-aggression pact. I hope
he graduated. I hope to Christ
I gave the kid a pass.
(featured in Miramar)
Why will I recount this for you,
fluent waitress bringing me pad
thai in the corner noodle shop?
How my father passed on only
empty-handed rage, having lost,
after Guadalcanal, all taste
for carnage, how I missed out
entirely on guns, how I see a guy
from fifty yards, in gray sweats,
looking like a thief about to pop
a door lock, and I trot up to find
this devout soccer dad who just
wants quiet as he faces east
kneeling between parked cars.
And we laugh. But if I,
lapsed pacifist, eluded the draft
and dodged a war, you did not.
An infant born near a firefight,
you could be immaterial as steam
rising from imagined broth. I long
to touch your delicate hands.
(featured in Matter Monthly)
Each word opening like
an old style map we drag out
of the glove box in the dark,
how will we speak to each other
of our simplest hopes, or of those
who bore us–not whole, not
from their foreheads? Years ago,
we tore off a roof as a storm blew up.
We cussed and spread our tarps.
When it cleared, our pounding resumed
its relentless, desperate prosody.
We sang hoarse Motown, balanced
plywood, shingles, and car notes
to stay ahead of the rain.
We’ve met the enemy and he looks
like we would if we’d first
been dipped in gold, though
he might be more than kin.
For not offering up my limbs
to the lush Vietnam forest,
I’ve been pardoned. I never saw
how quickly a life ebbs
when a leg is blown off.
I know how it ebbs here
where many limp on, “bootless,
blood-shod” or struggle to recall
a bright word for the last
bored few who’ll listen.
(featured in Sugar House Review)
