Create with Kim!

Cirrhosis

Wax crayons, guitar pics, stained glass, oils, pastels, charcoal, dark wine, gin, plum cordial-You in a coma, under your skin blood surfacing, ugly purple blotches-In death you are not creative-In death you are ugly, and it doesn’t matter if I color outside the lines in black, and it doesn’t matter if the guitar strings snap, or that I am alive and can write-Red crayon scrawling over your works-”Do Like this, like this, no like THIS!”-I broke your pics and brushes, watered down your gin, danced wild around the plum tree. You sang zippitee-do-da.

~poem by Kim Nixon

from The Long Haul

I’m bored with the 29 days in February

I want to tell the bus driver about watermelons
trucked from Texas and sold at a farm outside the village,
how I miss the blue of Cathead Bay,
that I’m riding the bus because
I fear running out of toilet paper, and
there’s a sale on Kleenex Double Roll at Wal-Mart.
I start to tell the bus driver
August in Northport
meant spiked watermelon at beach parties
and losing virginity in the sand,
but I fade-off before finishing and
watch the jackpine and bare tamaracks flash by.
The airbase is a ghost town;
soon couples will pick blueberries
and caress each other with stained fingers
and tongues.
I fear dependence
and public transportation,
and the young man in the back of the bus
who tells about his toilet habits,
how he once shit in the wastebasket
’cause every time the toilet overflowed
his dad strapped him.
I imagine purple welts
and his dog licking his face, but
my discomfort keeps my eyes on the bus driver’s back.
My husband has gone off to trucking school.
To stay warm on long hauls
he’ll wear his company coat.
I’ll curl up with the labs,
wait, take a mental count
of how many rolls of toilet paper remain in the cupboard,
and watch the ice break up on the Escanaba River.
I’ll write poems of love and loss
to read in August when
my mate brings home a truckload of exotic fruits.
Fruits, to suck on the sand shore
beside brown water,
where leeches hide and wood ticks
fall from the trees.

~poem copyright Kim Nixon

Winner of the Philip M. Legler Memorial Award 1997 at NMU.
First published in The Thaw: A Student Journal of Literature,
Vol 1 Issue I.

The Long Haul is a collection of poetry that you will not find in chapbook form (yet). The voice is the reflections of a wife during the first years of her husband’s search for employment in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and his choice to eventually become a over-the-road truck driver. The work is by Kim Nixon and is highly autobiographical and feels like a lifetime away now.

I do not have an opinion on this new political movement. I have to learn more. But I am open to questioning as I am worried about our futures. I am worried about my taxes. This was not a good year for me, financially and my taxes cost me a fortune and shouldn’t have. What will happen as we go on?

This demonstration was held on the courthouse steps in Marquette, Michigan. I ended up there as people were dispersing.

From the Long Haul

III.

You returned home hauling three mausoleums ate dinner and departed for the Mackinaw Bridge, the Sarnia Bridge, and your destination in Ontario. I placed my hands on the black speckled granite, felt the coolness and shivered. Death comes in loads that take you to destinations I have never seen. I tinker with the lawn mower, replace the battery, the fuse to the ignition. Earlier I retrieved our oldest from camp. In a fit of anger, he ran away. A search party was formed and they found him wandering downtown Marquette. Crying. It is a search for you. Random. A race for clarity. As I hugged our son, he states he’ll take the shotgun and blow that damn truck to smithereens. He has taken to sleeping on the living room floor. I do not know why. And I don’t ask. I cut the grass as the rain starts to fall. I must complete what I have started before it is too late, before the grass gets the upper hand, and the 10-horsepower motor becomes insufficient to pull me. I grow heavy, and in your absence, despondent. I sleep with the windows open despite the cool nights to hear the semis slow on the highway curves, the sound of the jakes, a lullaby. Tell me you’re coming home. Tell me you’re coming home. Tell me you’ll never leave. The tombs you brought home remain. I mow around their presence. The rain falls. The grave site cannot fall into neglect. The flowers must be bright. Orange daylilies transplanted to the driveway entrance nod their heads in the wind. And they nod, yes.

~poem copyright Kim Nixon

The Long Haul is a collection of poetry that you will not find in chapbook form (yet). The voice is the reflections of a wife during the first years of her husband’s search for employment in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and his choice to eventually become a over-the-road truck driver. The work is by Kim Nixon and is highly autobiographical and feels like a lifetime away now.

From the Long Haul

II.

On M-35 in front of the Department of Natural Resources, the windshield wipers slow, jerking to a stop, the radio quits, and the truck stalls. I turn the key over and over listening for a click, some sign of life. I think, what you’d do if you were here and pop the hood. But mechanics was your area of expertise. I am less pragmatic and stand in the downpour picturing your red Freightliner semi on some highway between Pittsburg and Milwaukee. It is the roads that connect us. Red and blue lights flash and I tell the officer that I’ve been jump starting this truck all day and there is nothing left in her. When the tow truck arrives, the driver asks why I don’t take it to the garage in town. I reply. I’m spoiled from the 14 years I had a live-in mechanic and to tow the damn thing home where it can wait for his return. Let it be a magnet, a beacon, let it guide him home.

~poem copyright Kim Nixon

The Long Haul is a collection of poetry that you will not find in chapbook form (yet). The voice is the reflections of a wife during the first years of her husband’s search for employment in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and his choice to eventually become a over-the-road truck driver. The work is by Kim Nixon and is highly autobiographical and feels like a lifetime away now.

From the Long Haul

I.

You’re driving East on Highway 80 heading towards vast storm complexes blooming along the front of a weather pattern. I trace the names of towns that you will approach and pass, each dot on the map bringing you closer to me. Brining you home to lightening and hail and twisters that leave a wake of devastation. How odd it seems you hauling a load of timber from Salt Lake to Des Moines, as if contractors anticipated a busy season. I now pay great attention to roads. The white line blurs. The asphalt a dark mystic place where romance is dreamed and illuminated by headlights. The flashing lick of flame from the bedside candle sends shadows across this page I write on. The glow softens the dividing lines. Your travels are logged, checked, paid for. Mine have become the refrain from some melancholy country song. To love you requires dreaming of landscapes: prairies grasses and shear rocky cliffs, steep embankments and truck stops, jack-knifed loads on icy roads and winds that flip trucks to their sides. The Weather Channel is as important as the Rand McNally Atlas. I watch the Travelers Forecast, quickly calculate mileage, and pray storm warnings will be lifted before you approach. Risks. 21 days between departure and arrival. You curled in the sleeper berth. Me in the double bed turning toward a pile of pillows.

~poem copyright Kim Nixon

The Long Haul is a collection of poetry that you will not find in chapbook form (yet). The voice is the reflections of a wife during the first years of her husband’s search for employment in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and his choice to eventually become a over-the-road truck driver. The work is by Kim Nixon and is highly autobiographical and feels like a lifetime away now.

Mike and I shot Negaunee on Good Saturday and stopped in to the Midtown Bakery and Cafe for a cup of joe and a brownie. Our hands were cold; it is still early for spring in the Upper Peninsula. The bakery is cheerful and even in February it is like your own spring each time you enter the door. It is a treat. A time out. But it is time for our spring, our hope. Time to rake out the garden beds. Time for grandchildren and dreams of a future for our towns.

Mom

I’m confused by my need to apologize for Dad
Who left your ashes for the funeral home to dispose of,
Anyway, they saw fit.

I have no tombstone to address, and
You’re not in the garden where you used to be.
If you were planted in my garden, each sprig and fall
I could sink my hands into you.

Yesterday, as I shopped for bone meal and Rapid Gro
at Franks Nursery and Crafts,
I perused the aisles of annuals and perennials.
You weren’t hiding behind shrubbery wrapped in burlap bags.

Thinking of white crosses on the graves of unknown soldiers, I
Wondered if any cemetery will do. I remember
The pond at the cemetery on Woodward Avenue.

You went to mourn, and I fed the ducks.

As caretaker, I have failed to tend your grave, as I failed
to tend to your life. Watering down Vodka wasn’t
An answer r then, and today as breadcrumbs float on this
Green pond I also realize in your departure
You’ve lightened my load.

~poem copyright Kim Nixon

Good Saturday, Mike and I shot Negaunee. The sun was at just such an angle that I kept capturing myself. So giving in I began to play with my reflection in windows. Oddly enough the second shot posted here is in the window of a portrait studio. I wonder what the photographer will think?