There are / echoes of what I am in what you perform / this morning.
—Robert Duncan

We moved to our now-family-home after the recession damaged my mountain town in the northwestern corner of North Carolina. Thomasville Furniture Factory boomed during my grade school years, and I can remember sitting on the brick retaining wall—during sunny days when our teachers rewarded us students with sunlight—and staring across the parking lot of the school where the factory set, watching the clear smoke of the mill shadow over Bluff Mountain in the distance. One of my classmates, D, his mother worked at the factory. Every so often, during PE, I remember he would try to run toward her at least once a week, and he would always get caught before he could make it off the playground or out of the tennis courts. He would say, in his high-pitched, seven-year-old voice, that his mother told him he could.

And just like that, all the folks that had come there for years, stopped coming. I didn't understand at the time but just noticed things seemed to be quieter near school; less cars, less smoke, no PA announcements. We could hear their pages over the loud speaker when our windows were cracked. It was spring. Thomasville was the first to go in my lifetime. Before that, it was years of outsourcing and downsizing for factories that were housed in my home. This lasted until 2009, a year when over 60 factories would close over North Carolina.

///

Today I worked with my human hands for the first time in years. I pulled a razor blade whisker-close to the wrecked and dented ambulance boxes and trucks, stripping off glue and decals, busting out dents, and sanding away corrosion before hanging them in the paint booth of my dad's shop. He has made his living through this process since I started high school. Each day is a similar process for him and his crew of three immigrant workers: breathing in sanded paint fumes filtered through their masks. We take breaks and eat cookies and drink soda. We set around the front desk and tell stories—mostly my dad about growing up, about how now things (human and non-human) are different. The evening folds in on itself while we are at home.

///

When I saw Abraham Smith read in Wilmington, North Carolina, I was immediately entranced by his howling, his stammer, his pigeon-toed and cowboy-leaning stance as he read from his previous book, Ashagalomancy. I was taken back to my growing up in a free-will Baptist church where my pastor preached with the same conviction Abe read with. As a child, I sat in the pews scared of what I was and who I was becoming. And while Abe's reading was dosed with the spirit and the lively, there was no self-internalizing hate. But there was that same mirror, of the spirit maybe. The same mirror you are forced to gaze in when you are diagnosed a backslidden sinner in sanctuary of a church alongside your other mountain town people. Abe takes and cradles this holy mirror, but shatters it at the same time. The broken pieces of the mirror are perhaps part of the rural identity, fractured by ideology, fractured by personal relationships to the land, by government. The pieces are also the conventional notions of poetry, and each shard of the broken mirror-mosaic jabs into the lines of his poems.

///

Rurality is broken. Cut up by Dollar General at home. More Dollar Generals than I can count off the top of my head. The money leaves the counties. Rurality is broken up by others and you. You are a participant in it regardless of how difficult it is for you to believe. Rurality is a KFC/Taco Bell. Rurality is the farmers market being placed on a single slab of concrete and grown out of the state because of hurricane flood. Rurality is bridge washed out, and the river never stops moving. At the BBQ restaurant, we imagine we are in a rural place, with antlered deer mounted on the wall, in the woods, in the hills of time, tucked deeper than plate tectonics, and ignore there is a chain bank beside us, aching in our head, even worse.

///

The mountains can be isolating and carve into you a sense of ‘fucked no matter what' mentality. If you've lived near the grass, near where people use their hands, near where the days are hounding and long, where the screams inside your chest belt and buckle your knees, where your hands ache when you lay down, then you know this guy:

"and it was then he knew a life without options
simple frank rock bottom balding the bottom line"

I see my dementia-plagued grandmother. I see the lines of the highway late in the afternoon, after it rains. O, and the crows—lining the fence to the backdoor neighbors we don't speak to.

"everything out there is against that crow ya know" (XLVIII)

And then we go back to work or just set down for a second or just catch our breaths or just go and pick up something else to fix.

///

I knew three kids in my high school that killed themselves in four years.

///

I hung around the bar to have a beer and spoke with Abe about a few mutual friends we had and to get a copy of his book. He asked me who I was reading, and this was about the time Frank Stanford's collected work was rereleased into the world. We talked a little about Frank, and inside my copy of his book he inscribed: "Roll TVZ."

As I was driving home to work this week, I heard a line that supposedly Townes Van Zandt said when he was asked about his songwriting. He said, "I want to write songs so good even I don't know what they're about."

///

I read Destruction of Man for a good while waiting on dinner. I wrote:

and now is the point in which I worry about immense debt and worry about having a job and worry about moving across the country and worry that I have a brain tumor or just worry about worrying you worry too much about this and what is the destruction of man (man) or the destruction of the land too for even when I close my eyes I can see the rain closing in summer of never ending rain over three top peak where the torturous roads scare my aunt to detour and where the creek lets me know I am man for my legs aren't as steady and my grip of toes attempt to claw through my wading boots and in the first section, Abe is holding an axe which seems to be an attempt to measure the way my father holds a piece of wood before he cuts and this section is now broken and I am worrying again about destruction and breaking down my hands are hurting and knees are swelling wider than ditches

///

While a book-length poem, the book is in rows, marked by the "///." Smith leads readers through the psyche of a rural landscaped aerated by the late capitalistic notions of accomplishment, work, and failure. All which prey on the consciousness of the locals as they "sit on a shed rafter while he cussed a machine." And though the machine is not a direct depiction of the people, they become mirrors of identity here for Smith. The holy machine, the tractor of demise, carries "a sound," "a name," and "the bones" that are "just as white as your own" (XVIII). And it is treated as so. It is valued as a person. It is cussed like the rest of us. It is expected to work, even like the rest of us.

///

My parents bought our now-family-home in the middle of the Great Recession. Prior to this house, we moved each year—house to house, cabin to house. Around town. And the mold of the one I remember the most used to make me itch, used to make my throat swell. Still, the basement was holy. Holy because of the freedom I felt there. I would rub my human toes through the mildewed fringe carpet from the 70s. To us, each home was ours. But when we got to this house, my mom was excited to grow a garden in our backyard. Gardening is something she missed dearly and was unable to do until we could afford the space. Her and dad staked out a plot—20 feet long, 10 wide—where they could plant lettuce, tomatoes, and squash up front, green beans, potatoes, and corn in the back. The garden grew swell for 2 years. I helped out when I was home.

///

To the right of the garden was arching white oak, which now as I'm looking at it, is swaying as a thunderstorm is closing in.

///

Farming isn't the romanticized version of pastoral harmony. It never was. Look at his hands. Look at the underpaid. Look at the farms where ICE breaks terror into and separates a family of migrant workers. Look at the greedy cops that ride our tail. Nothing is good that doesn't bleed. It is grueling and unrewarding, farming and life. I think of this as I am sanding an ambulance box, listening to a podcast about country music. What is the point of country music? To be spit out by a machine in Nashville? Machines are now all I have, the whining of the sander, the purity of the air hose, and how much of farming is a waiting on the machine to take over, the human in me is waiting, the animal is paused, and I listen. Until the machine malfunctions, until the pipes are clogged, until we fuck it up, then we cuss it, too, but we are grateful for the holy machines.

And Abe knows the oldest run better, just like guitars. He laments for his companion, perhaps foreseeing the end in his poet-eyes, for he knows, as Townes sings, "if you feel like Mud, you'll end up Gold."

tractor dear   may you frickin forever churn full
like a turle  lives   forever free fall old
water's a catchy relazing atmosphere
and the turtle in it  suspended  floating
an idea   not an action
the skydive free (LXIV).

But can we ache for the machines, the combines, the engines, the mowers, the tillers, the sanders, the air hoses, the rest? Are we allowed to be welded together, to work for them, as the rust or dirt or corrosion is sanded off or else thrown in the daylight? And you can't win for losing sometimes, my dad would often say. He would say this when he was frustrated in work or life, he would say this after my mom scratched a lottery ticket.

///

It's difficult to write about ruralness without becoming victim to the neoliberal logic that rural areas and its peoples are gun-toting hillbillies, ignorant, wave ol glory, drive our tractors, buckshot, and so on. This is carefully constructed by candidates who seek entirely to abandon rural areas in policy and even in rallies. That is the type of abandonment we hear and see. We smell it in the cabbage cooking on the stove.

Abe writes:

if something wild with eyes teeth a mouth
is a chance that's what a farmer hates
if a gun is residual of a people on people war
then the farmer pumping lead into the corner
of the pasture shoots beautiful
bruises blooming lichen style into where his
once wing sleeps time after time out walking
thru the head high grass why a buzzard
has a face I'll never know should be bell
for brain (LXXXVII)

And the peoples, the farmers and others, are victim to this physiological hijacking. Maybe this is what causes the guilt. Maybe therefore the farmers are bought out. Maybe this destruction happens internally but still, projected in the landscape. Cut, scissor, jig sawed, but restlessly expected to give, both land and people give.

///

Driving through the West Virginia mountains I wrote:

and why do we try to live sometimes inside a broken machine that is both animal and human that is both man-made and organic and why do my eyes burn so much when I walk outside in spring and why is my father deathly allergic to horses and hay and why did I just find out that my grandfather was a coal miner and why did everyone shit him out of a dollar

all I can say is it's muskrat season and that fine weaver of lines and all I can say is what to write more of this, more like this, in the steeped vain of others, for the destruction of man may be the self-destruction of others, the improvised understanding of what can make us think, ticking, ticking or not the sky will fold and when ol Gabriel's trumpet blows will I be the last to go, last to cut my human body open and be evaporated into the rays of blue sky, but all I can say is that would be nice, all I can say is I would settle to just be a laurel bush, a branch that waves back and forth only once in a while.

///

I finished reading As I Lay Dying this week along with Abe's book. I don't know if they're related. I don't know if Cash's broken leg is a machine. I don't know whose teeth Anse wants. I know my heart aches for the boy I knew that overdosed. I haven't seen him in years. What is a destruction to him or his family now and is a garden or not?

///

Admittedly, I don't have the best reading practices: I read when I'm stalled out on writing, I read when I'm thinking about other things. I read when I'm watching TV.

///

I'm almost halfway through Abe's book, simply judging by bookmark. I can't read Roman Numerals this high and to Google them seems pointless. I get the sense that Abe is creating, and I don't know if you can say that about many poets today. Not in a horseshit or hokey way, but actually creating things: languages, forms, rhymes, words, forms, narrative, and so on. I never feel acutely aware of where I am in The Destruction of Man, but I am not far from the next turn.

Today I stood in the rain during my break at work. I looked up the nameless mountain beside my father's shop and thought about how green everything looked peeking through the midst. I thought about Abe's line "land farms you," which reveals to be a revelatory moment for the speaker as they begin to see themselves transformed by the physical labor: "yr body's flesh / unbraiding / braiding / bearing it" (XV). And what is one to do but bear it? Bear it as it "ploughs you," "disks you," "drags you," and "rolls you." I wrote this in my cell phone:

and the sander is the holy tool of today
for let us give thanks to the mill workers
whom have left up with the trilogies of harpoon-lodged thoughts
pick axe my head with soda pop
prick my hands with a main line
just give me a little hooter of shine
or a dollar and a half for a coke
put your legs up and pull yr hat down low
tie your shoes with the braided hair of you farm dog
drive it up on the hill
let the brake down and coast
ride the ridge for a mile or so

///

The garden at my family home stopped growing two summers ago. The oak that towered beside the plot was infected with some sort of disease that poisoned the soil. Mom and I went to the town to get some treatment fertilizer that was supposed to neutralize it, to keep it from spreading. We tossed it on the ground, and it scorched our grass.

Every so often, I dream I am going to hell. That I am on fire. That my skin if peeling off my human-bone frame.

///

I read an interview with Daniel Antopolsky, a musician that hung out on the fringes of Texas songwriters Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. There's a famous photo of them all and Suzanna setting on Guy's front porch playing music but since then, no one has really heard much of Daniel Antopolsky. In the interview, he recounts a terrifying moment with Townes. Daniel is quick to note that while he would smoke and snort and eat anything, he would never inject nothing. Townes was much different, much more lonesome than perhaps anyone in that scene. Townes strapped a rubber band around his arm and said he needed to take a little nap. Daniel was with him when his nap went wrong and Townes's lips turned blue and shaking. He was afraid the cops would haul them both to jail for the drugs, so before he called for an ambulance, he tossed them into the bushes. Townes barely lived and Daniel left the country for a while.

///

I'm interested in the titles of the sections of the poems, and how they build, build until they burst: The beginning, it catches me off guard. I read "TRACTOR BLISTER SONG MOUTH HAWK VULTURE SONG DIESEL BEAUTY MICE SONG DESTRUCTION SONG MY TRY AT WAYS IN" as Abe reads along which is heard on the record included. It is followed by nine other sections equally described, my favorite title being "LOST TEETH MORE SOME POSSIBILITES IDENTITY PLACE IN TIME AND WHAT A PASTORAL PILE OF SHIT COUNTRY MEN WERE IN THE DAY FEATURING ONE EPIPHANY REGARDING DAMAGE ASSESSMENT." I get the sense that the sections were named after the initial composition of poems, maybe being a way Smith goes back and attempts to make meaning of his own poems, a way of reorienting one's distance in relationship to one's work. For me, I often look back at the bulk of material I have generated and try to weave through it; building what I can use, piling up what I can't for now. Smith is careful what he uses, careful what he includes. Despite the ala stream-of-consciousness traits that he gets labeled with, his poems are carefully mined, precariously tended to, and fertilized with contorted syntax/freshness.

I think of the titles as I lay in bed. I try to say them back to myself in order, but I don't think I can get them right. Of the 12 sections, I remember two word-for-word: COUNTRY MUSIC and the middle English, FINIS. Both shorter titled sections appear at the end of the book. In fact, the titles get shorter throughout. I want to make this mean that farms are disappearing rapidly. I want this to mean that Nashville's Music Row idolizes this lifestyle and therefore it is used up, spit into a can, thrown overboard. I want this to mean that in poetry and in tractors, they just flat stall-out. I fall asleep before I decide which one to settle on.

///

There is a psychological balance here, one that resonates with me. Who do we blame for this? This type of consciousness or is it self-imposed. I don't know if I have done something to feel like a gutter of sorrow for land and for earth and for people and for animals and for everything but goddamn, if you don't think something isn't a little sad about the whole now and here earth thing, well you might as well need to get your head checked because we have lost this. Who knows if it was to be had in the first place. We find a way to complain because we are marked outsiders and scorned by the educated, the wealthy, the politicians, the pharmacies, the internet, and I can go on like this forever. That's the mindset country people have because they have to have it. And sadness or guilty has no time here. It's well past time to get going if you're planning on being down on yourself:

woe unto you if in reality you are the cause of yr
breakdowntime you are the breakdown time you yrself took
a look in the pissin silo nothing but wine took a peek
in the pissin tool box pissin winecoolers brooked the
pissin shed pbr pbr like a rash they was always
visitin always steppin to town praise be to the river
too dirty to be the tincture to mend the true real life fracture all this is (XCVIII)

For whatever way you have taken to find yourself not guilty of feeling this, country person, just know this is the portrait, you are a banded-arrowhead on the surface but still a dime a dozen. We ache like this and no river can help fix it, no natural thing. I afraid we have fucked it away. Still, be good for the "land farms you" (XV).

///

Farming, as we know it today, is a factory. A factory of pseudo-realistic animals, fish, machines, and people. You know this but the animals we eat are pumped full of antibiotics, growth hormones, and nigh even slaughtered by a human hand so much as a machine, ahhh yes, the hallowed human hand to lay a victory of power across the score of swine head and the fish are gutted on a conveyer belt, and the people are bought as well, so as are most today, and the eyes of the factory farmers are pinholes, and their hands are infected, and I do not say this to indict anyone other than the fuckhole uncle Sam, because it is no one's fault. My friend Michael says eating is ethical compromise when we talk about it. And we have to eat and we have to farm.

///

The payoff is spiritual, but you can't spend it. It's deeper than that but you can still be hungry: "want one? one what? dime / this is my minimum face wage" (LXV). But it's easy to make money when you've got it. The construction company in my town grew from a one-man business. It's easy to open your skull when you're dead.

In the evening, I wash my face and pick at the places the lacquer thinner dries out on my hands. I know that if I don't rest soon, tomorrow will be hard. There's a rhythmic process to the whole thing, my life, at this point. Gears are going.

into the life of the machine
more the residual of diesel combustion
more the shadowed shepherd of the vowel A tastes
…
die out random
random and rainbow. (LXV)

And the rhythms last longer for my people in the country and to my father. The rhythms are swaying around, buckling the knees but feeding the bellies. The fields are badly bruised.