Poem with the Machine That Will End Your Life

We begin with a travel-pack of drill bits, worn
into the back pocket of blue jeans like a wallet
or tin of tobacco. Long coils of aluminum

or iron shavings on a concrete slab. The sound
of a hatchet on an anvil. Sparks falling among
open buckets of paint thinner. In a small garage

somewhere in Missouri, a man breathes into
a radiator, hoping to pass a life on. His ear on the empty
hole as a sound escapes. That, friends, was the ocean.

Through welded heat and blue flames we find the body.
Broken and sand blasted. Somewhere the Iron Maiden
rolls over and asks Have I been asleep so long?

Somewhere a railroad spike moves out
of the ground, listens to the track and then buckles.
The end of the world will sound the same.

A life crawls through a maze of metal and oil,
fights to free itself of the hollowness from which
it came. And then wheels. And then throttles.

And then gauges and valves, levers and handles,
pistons, pipes, chrome from front to back.
Your face reflected in the gas tank stretched

like one last, lonesome breath. The key, the ignition,
the roar of something blue. Then a heartbeat
groans inside. The end, as you hear it muffled.




Clay Matthews has work published recently or forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Spork, H_NGM_N, Diner, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and elsewhere. His chapbook, MUFFLER, will be published by H_NGM_N B_ _K S in the fall of 2005. He currently serves as associate editor for the Cimarron Review while pursuing a Ph.D. at Oklahoma State.


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