Matt Mason
Total Eclipse
What you don't suspect,
though you've known me
for years, is that I
am in mid-interpretive dance,
internally,
because we are on the interstate,
headed to buy bread or to a movie or pick up a child,
restless on the radio, tuning
away from muffler commercials
or Bryan Adams songs, and you wonder
why I'm not changing
away from
this song,
you don't suspect
my hands, you cannot see
how they, acrobatically,
roll a ball, stretch skyward,
the gymnast in my soul
bends back, then crouches, then leaps
with such grace, oh,
nineteen eighty-three, a year that is
to 1986 like Jim Steinman is to David Bowie
(you know, not as cool, not as lauded),
Bonnie Tyler's Welsh rasp
(as I unroll the ribbon,
one leg arcing upward),
I turned fifteen in 1983,
every now and then I fell apart,
I was not living in a powder keg
yet felt like I should have, as,
man, all fifteen year olds are giving off sparks,
we don't dare
let our faces show it,
we keep it
inside, don't let
the light
shine out, like,
like
something's blocking it or something, so
you don't suspect
the opera,
the spectacle,
the fireworks
happening in the driver's seat next to you,
nothing I can say
as the radio plays
and the tires
scratch gravel
and whirr
and I just appear
to be watching
the road
as we drive.
What you don't suspect,
though you've known me
for years, is that I
am in mid-interpretive dance,
internally,
because we are on the interstate,
headed to buy bread or to a movie or pick up a child,
restless on the radio, tuning
away from muffler commercials
or Bryan Adams songs, and you wonder
why I'm not changing
away from
this song,
you don't suspect
my hands, you cannot see
how they, acrobatically,
roll a ball, stretch skyward,
the gymnast in my soul
bends back, then crouches, then leaps
with such grace, oh,
nineteen eighty-three, a year that is
to 1986 like Jim Steinman is to David Bowie
(you know, not as cool, not as lauded),
Bonnie Tyler's Welsh rasp
(as I unroll the ribbon,
one leg arcing upward),
I turned fifteen in 1983,
every now and then I fell apart,
I was not living in a powder keg
yet felt like I should have, as,
man, all fifteen year olds are giving off sparks,
we don't dare
let our faces show it,
we keep it
inside, don't let
the light
shine out, like,
like
something's blocking it or something, so
you don't suspect
the opera,
the spectacle,
the fireworks
happening in the driver's seat next to you,
nothing I can say
as the radio plays
and the tires
scratch gravel
and whirr
and I just appear
to be watching
the road
as we drive.
Francisco Vásquez de Coronado y Luján at the Burger King
"Coronado, seeking gold in New Mexico, was told of Quivira [where there were]
'people whose pots and pans were beaten gold’...Coronado marched north ‘by the
needle' from a point in Texas until he reached Kansas.”
–Kansas Historical marker on US56
What I have discovered
in life, good child,
is that there are many chicken sandwiches
who, in the telling,
are like cities of gold
and promise
but which,
in the truth
of the tongue
are just more mayonnaise
and barbecue sauce
and eternal nights of longing.
"Coronado, seeking gold in New Mexico, was told of Quivira [where there were]
'people whose pots and pans were beaten gold’...Coronado marched north ‘by the
needle' from a point in Texas until he reached Kansas.”
–Kansas Historical marker on US56
What I have discovered
in life, good child,
is that there are many chicken sandwiches
who, in the telling,
are like cities of gold
and promise
but which,
in the truth
of the tongue
are just more mayonnaise
and barbecue sauce
and eternal nights of longing.
Matt Mason is the Nebraska State Poet. He runs poetry programming for the State Department, working in Nepal, Romania, Botswana and Belarus. Matt is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for his poem “Notes For My Daughter Against Chasing Storms” and his work can be found in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. The author of Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (The Backwaters Press, 2006) and The Baby That Ate Cincinnati (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2013), Matt is based out of Omaha with his wife, the poet Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and daughters Sophia and Lucia.