Pulling Apart

1. Sitting in a Rusted-out ’40 Ford Coupe in July

Of all the dream machines (now scrapped,
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.