abandoned, forgotten) that seem to rumble to life as the morning sun burns the dew from their rusty hoods and fenders,
when even the dusty weeds and creepers
overtaking them sport a sheen almost lovely before the day’s heat wilts them into submission,
whatever the puller is feeling
about it, he doesn’t put into words.
Of all the days he has roamed the hills
of Level Cross Auto Salvage when the dry, rutted lanes and crossroads trailed his dust alone—
whatever his don’t give a shit looks convey,
if they could unmake these wrecks, restore them
to factory specs, re-roll them off Detroit’s assembly line, give them back to families taking vacations, business men calling on clients, lovers cruising Main Street, old folks going to Sunday church,
the puller would do it, but he can no more
do that than pull his life together.
He can’t affect Predictable Patterns,
lay a Destiny upon them, imbue objects with Probability Energy; he is improvident.
Of the way his grease-hardened coveralls
crackle when he stretches on the old Ford’s rotten bench seat, when he reads the big story in Racing Rumors of the dirt track legend’s auto-erotic death,
if that sound mimics moving a gasper
strung up with an antique racing harness,
whatever casualties from heat death
he may witness, even though he might not get it—and our don Quixote of the salvage yard doesn’t get much about the choices people make—
What brings a man to make his spot
in a hot, rusty ’40 Ford coupe in the middle of a field just this side of hell? 2. Iron Jungle
There’s a rasping like the rasping of
a cicada that tells him where to look: walkie-talkie static is the echoed order to find what he already knew he was looking for.
The honeysuckle, kudzu, and sumac
give their veiled replies from broken headlight housings, cracked chrome grilles, punctured trunk panels concerning loss.
The coded question is why iron is
always so phlegmatic about its own slow rot.
It’s as if the yard were shrinking
since Detroit forgot how to make cars.
A car can repeat its name only
so many times before the mud-daubers, lining its sheet metal cavities, start a chorus for Mustangs, Firebirds, Barracudas, Impalas. The checkered flags strung up between the light poles always tickle him: someone’s idea of a lame junkyard joke.
Like it was his daddy’s corn maze,
the puller threads his way through the yard, stirring up rabbits and black snakes. 3. Finding the Eyeball
Check wrecks for empty cupholders
and ashtrays.
Shake off the feeling that if you don’t find
the victim’s eyeball there, it will be rolling around under your seat the way a kid’s b-bs roll around inside the puzzle until they find their sockets.
The eyeball is out there in the junkyard,
rolling around, searching for the familiar curve and bone of its face,
flesh whispering to flesh until it finds
you: you’ll be pulling a part and look up and it’ll be staring you in the face.
It’s happened to him, the puller tells
first-time yard visitors to spook them.
Tells them it’s the ghost eyeball of
St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers.
The sheer unlucky fact of being there
proves the puller has learned something about locating Disorder.
Shake it off now: the relic will save
your life. 4. Pulling a Fender
Because the day is one rusty bolt
after another to flout his efforts, he tries not to suffer any false dichotomy between knowing and doing.
Whether he scraps a few knuckles or
curses the rounded-off cap, those are his proof that the world is as it is, if only that they make him respect it and the limits of his temper.
Isn’t removing a fender
about matching stubborn against stubborn, showing rust what you’re made of?
He had been raised that way, and so
he opened the car door first to look behind it for the two main retaining bolts.
A socket wrench broke them loose and launched
a dozen yellowjackets.
Along the hood recess, he took out six
more bolts before the fender pulled away from its steel frame, leaving behind a little ragged skin and a few more drops of blood. 5. Reflections in a Wall of Convex Hubcaps
It isn’t that he can’t see what’s hiding
in its chrome mirrorings: automobiles melting like ice cubes on a July day.
The reflected structure of the cars
lose their created shape as they melt, every particle of their iciness becoming liquid and mixing in with water.
He might’ve expected the oracle’s
entropic reflection to be more dramatic: on the other side, all of the original car particles are hidden, but they’re still there.
Now he knows, right? all those shining
hubcaps can mutate Ephemera— how they cause his mind to wander in some mirage of the past—or how they reweave Destiny to choose him for its relic.
That tiny figure he sees multiplied
by the wall’s hundreds of hubcaps could be the patron saint of travelers— or just the junkyard’s dog. 6. Auto-Cubism
When the hydraulics of the crushing plate
force it down, the four stacked car bodies snap-pop, lose all coherent sense of depth, and look as though they could be one car moving in four directions at once.
Like four snowflakes melting
into each other, re-freezing, falling through layers of warm and cold air, clumping on some traveler’s admiring eyelid.
It’s not a question of 2400
psi, accelerating the process of inaccuracy and failure—they were created to fill new ambiguous space by the Detroit avant-garde every year.
A cube of crushed cars is a puzzle
for june bugs, red dirt, pokeberry stalks, new-born possums, cigarette butts, mob murders to roll around in, to find their resting place— forklifted closer to eternity. 7. Barrel-Rolled
Wherever would he be if a window
crank in his father’s car had not come loose— an unexpected weight heavy as a capgun— in his four-year old hand, the first part the puller ever pulled.
As though that day were his whole life,
under tall pines at the back of the salvage yard, he sat in its rusted-out shell, foundering, not knowing what hit him.
Some say when Lee Petty barrel-rolled
a borrowed ’48 Buick Roadmaster, spraying red mud and flashing chrome, he cheated death, and Part One of a family racing legend was in the books.
Don’t worry, one day Christ’s hooks will grab
everything and pull it apart, and a tall stranger will carry what remains across a dark river on an unknowable errand.
Henry Stevens - Hitler's Flying Saucers - A Guide To German Flying Discs of The Second World War New Edition (2013, Adventures Unlimited Press) - Libgen - lc-116-120