Moving to Tishomingo
Trying to end a poem in Tishomingo
Last night I smoked nearly ten American Spirits on a bench outside the Boom-A-Rang Diner downtown and tried to write ending lines. I thought that “close your eyes: now you see tulips growing from maple trees, apples that bleed like we do” would be a good one. I can’t write a poem if I don’t have an end line to work toward. Ambrose Bierce’s last letter from Mexico read “I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.” That was a bit much, but then he was a child of a different century. Hart Crane simply yelled “Goodbye, everybody,” jumped overboard. And I imagine the moon was the same that night on the Gulf of Mexico as it was last night on Pennington Creek as I walked back. A reflection of a reflection, the sun trying so fucking hard to find its way back home.
Learning the local history of Tishomingo
For the money, you can’t beat a local newspaper or county history museum. I haven’t spoken to my sister in years, though she keeps building a family on the other side of the world. Both of these things are gentler than the slide of the hook through the fish’s mouth, or the way the pile of powdered creamer in my coffee at an AA meeting spills away from itself and looks like an island returning to the sea. At what point does a building, replaced brick by brick, cease to be itself? Today I arranged several Pothos plants in the window of my office and remembered checking the body of a possum I found on the side of the road in South Bend. Her pouch was full of pink, squirming pups, still safe in her belly, which was now the warmest part of her.
Considering oil production in Tishomingo
In Illinois, I passed a field of tiny active oil pump jacks on Interstate 70. I always forget that Illinois is an oil-producing state until I see them, the heads in a smooth movement, up and down, like a bowing monk forever thanking the fields for this gift. In Oklahoma all of the pump jacks I’ve seen are stationary. I don’t know if they’ve just been given a break but a few are rusting and overgrown with thin, twisting trees that force their branches through the joints and the scaffolding and eventually cover the thing entirely. The effect is rather like a scar. Skin enveloping a rusting needle left in the vein after the blood ran out. And that’s not what saddens me about them. More, it’s that they put me in mind of a poet who publishes a single book and then stays that way, head bowed in some type of adoration.
Having preconceptions about landscape corrected in Tishomingo
My first night in Tish I found myself floating with the wind above downtown. I noticed the light had a certain gravity and expected a minor lensing effect. Maybe a portal opening, if I was lucky. I thought the town would look like an L.S. Lowry painting. Instead, the landscape below looked like something by Thomas Cole. How silly did I feel? How tired I still was. Tired, too tired to care.
The Rag and Bone shop of the heart (in Tishomingo)
Draw your next epiphany from the riverbed, a smooth, white stone. You were adamant, right up until this morning, that divorce was a release from a contract of indentured servitude. A rag-and-bone man was just that. Men could make a living that way, selling rags, selling bones. The same used to be true for short story writers and, once upon a time, poets. You still offer them up, but it’s just a hobby now. “Here,” you say. “I found these rags, these bones. You don’t need to pay me. It’s enough to know that you remember them.” Close your eyes. Now you see flowers growing in maple trees, apples that bleed as we do.
Watching planes fly to exotic locations from down here in Tishomingo
When I see planes at night, I imagine people looking down at the spidery orange spokes of towns and wondering who is down there. This is not another list of things I am or am not. Jenny and Zeke ’07 in a heart. A pentagram. An incompetent swastika. Some mark left by the city. I think I am in a photo I saw taken from the International Space Station. The Great Lakes at Night, black shapes ringed in lights. The shape of South Bend-Elkhart, yellow there. When Röntgen made an early x-ray photograph of his wife’s hand and her rings, she exclaimed, “I have seen my death!” When William Anders photographed the Earth, tilted and rising over the surface of the moon, he was the only human, living or dead, not in that photo. What a lovely surprise, when you notice yourself in the background of someone else’s photo. Ah yes, we think. So we were alive after all.
Craig Finlay is a writer and librarian who lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, by way of South Bend, Chicago, and the Midwest beyond. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, most recently The Ilanot Review, Little Patuxent Review, Levee Magazine, and Coast\noCoast. His first collection, The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island, is forthcoming from Urban Farmhouse Press.