Tag: Anders Carlson Wee

I didn’t look under the hood the way you would have.

An old Ford hardtop wedged between two trees 

in a cornfield as if it was parked there before 

the trees took root. The backdoor jimmied open. 

The steering wheel in place, but the pedals gone. 

I was walking a shortcut to the hospital 

because you were dying again. You’d been dying 

for so long it was hard to say from what. 

Ten years ago it was liquor, which led to diabetes. 

Now add cancer. Now pneumonia. The first drops 

of rain nickel-and-dimed the windshield but lacked 

the body to run the glass. They sat like solo climbers 

bivouacked at night on a bald granite face.

I stretched out on what was left of the backseat, 

the springs squealing at the pressure points 

as if to complain of the various weights of me. 

Meanwhile you were adding up to less and less. 

Forget about muscle––your skin waxed down 

to a windowpane, your limbs thickest at the joints. 

And as I lay in that totaled car waiting out the storm, 

all I could think about was how you waterskied 

at the family cabin years ago, how you slalomed 

with a natural’s ease, held the towrope one-handed, 

carved walls outside the wake, threw eight-foot sprays. 

And after a few days in the emergency wing 

getting half your liver removed, followed by 

that short stint in rehab, I remember the last time 

you tried––the same old life vest so oversized 

you had to switch it for a kid’s one. The easy 

bruises on your shins. The towrope assuming 

from your hands like a loon before you could lift 

above the wake. What happened to that athlete? 

That engineer? What slipped from your hands

and skidded across the lake and sank? I couldn’t sleep. 

The wind picked up. Raindrops veined into each other 

and pooled, sluicing down in chutes to the hood. 

And honestly Josh, I wish I could say the surgery 

failed, or the cancer spread, or the pneumonia found 

a foothold. I wish I could tell you I never made it 

to the hospital to see you. That in the end it rained all night 

and bad luck struck one or the other of the trees 

I was under. I wish I could believe the reasons 

the preacher gave at the funeral, or the mumbles 

of our mothers under the motor-drone on the drive home. 

But the truth is, you lived on for years. Thinned 

your six-foot-four frame to ninety-five pounds 

fully dressed and wet. You didn’t lose a fight. 

Nothing was after you. You moved up to the family cabin 

to avoid paying rent, smoked Camels 

with the curtains drawn and the television on, 

though you didn’t watch it, and one day you were gone.

Reprinted from The Low Passions by Anders Carlson-Wee. Copyright (c) 2019 by Anders Carlson-Wee. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 

The Lord came down because God wasn’t enough. 

He lies on sodden cardboard behind bushes 

in the churchyard. Wrapped in faded red. A sleeping bag

he found or traded for. Dark stains like clouds 

before a downpour. The stone wall beside him rising, 

always rising, the edges of stone going blunt 

where the choirboy climbs. He opens his mouth,

but nothing goes in and nothing comes out.

Like the sideshow man who long ago lost

his right testicle to the crossbar of a Huffy.

He peddles the leftover pain. The stitches clipped 

a week later by his father, the fiberglass bathtub 

running with color, the puffy new scar,

the crooked look of the pitted half-sack.  

He tells me you only need one nut, and I want 

to believe him. I want to believe he can still

get it up. I want to believe he has daughters, sons, 

a grandchild on the way, a wife at home 

in a blue apron baking. But why this day-old bread 

from the dumpster, this stash of hollow bottles

in the buckthorn, this wrinkled can of Pabst?

The Lord came down because God wasn’t enough.

Because the childless man draws the bathwater

and cries. Because the choirboy never sings 

as he climbs. Because the bread has all molded

and the mouths are all open. Open to the clotting air.

Homeless, anything helps. Anything. Anything you can 

spare. God bless you, God bless you, God bless. God, 

Lord God, God God, good God, good Lord very good God.

Reprinted from The Low Passions by Anders Carlson-Wee. Copyright (c) 2019 by Anders Carlson-Wee. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 

I twist in my seat beside the woman who picked me up 

on County 19, reaching back to help her son 

eat his Happy Meal. I fly a french fry through the air,

thinking how weird it is to hitch a ride on the road 

I’ve driven so many times with my dad––

the route between our house and the old folks home 

where Grandma lasted alone for fourteen years. 

Each time we visited: the veins wider, bluer, 

the ankles thinner, the distances between bedsores 

diminished, the cheer my dad convinced himself to feel 

as he repeated the litany: I am your son. 

This is your grandson. We’re so happy to see you.

The woman asks me where I’m going 

and I say as far as you can take me,

but as we pass the old folks home I tell her to pull over. 

The boy is finished with his Happy Meal and now 

he points at the bruise on his elbow and says Ouch.

His mom nods at him in the rearview as I get out. 

That’s right, she says. Ouch. There is the low roofline,

the sign with a bible quote in changeable letters,

my grandma’s old window as blank as it was 

when she lived here, some earth dug up 

in the bordering cornfield for construction 

of a new wing. I think about barging through the doors 

and demanding to see Elizabeth Wee, making 

some kind of scene. I think about setting up camp 

in the hole in the cornfield and refusing to leave. 

But instead I wander the grounds for awhile. 

I lie in the parking lot’s grass island and watch 

the cornstalks feather the road with lank shadows, 

the sunlight dipping down into the tassels. 

I want speed. I want new people. To ditch 

this slow sanitary drain of golden light, 

my pastor parents and their immovable faith, 

this town’s brown river exhausting its banks. 

Elizabeth is underground. So is my cousin. 

Stones like polished teeth in the family plot. 

In the twilight I walk back to the shoulder 

and catch a ride from a farmer hauling a trailer 

stacked with hay bales three-high. When he asks me 

where I’m going I say as far as you can take me.

Reprinted from The Low Passions by Anders Carlson-Wee. Copyright (c) 2019 by Anders Carlson-Wee. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.