James Engelhardt

James Engelhardt’s poems have appeared in the North American Review, Hawk and Handsaw, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, Terrain.org, Painted Bride Quarterly, Fourth River, and many others. His ecopoetry manifesto is “The Language Habitat,” and his book, Bone Willows, is available from Boreal Books (Red Hen Press). He lives in South Carolina and lecturers in English at Furman University.

From Anchor Point to Anchor Point

Thurn and Taxis, Andreas Seyfarth and Karen Seyfarth, Rio Grande Games, 2006

I shuffle ahead in the check-out aisle
trying to place the Christmas tune
that will not stop, and I’m thinking
of the shapes of all the hands that shaped
the products lining the cashier’s line and then
I’m facing the tired woman scanning barcodes
and she tells me that her nephew is in my class.

I don’t have any news for her.
One story unspools into the heart of another.
The one pebble in my car’s cup holder
connects me to the neighborhood garden,
the one behind the church
where I first saw a black widow spider
crossing the sidewalk, and my wife and I
paused to watch, fighting the urge to pick it up,
to turn it over, to confirm the red hourglass.

We remembered that spider
when we cleared the shed crushed
by the shallow-rooted white oak
toppled in a wind storm. In the debris
a cautious mob of widow sisters
hurried on pins to cooler, undisturbed rubble,
found safety under possum skeletons we’d find later.

Are stories news? I tell my friend
over beers at a backyard barbecue
the story of my cousin who collapsed one day
after losing his home
and no one can find where he’s gone.
I’ve lost the practice of these human webs.
And all around me nodes and paths
branch out across old game trails—
transform into roads, towns, shopping malls.

It’s still Christmas. The spiders dormant.
My cousin is still lost in central Ohio.
The sun splashes on the windshield
as I rehearse my story and the radio
reports another death. Am I connected?
I know the name. I repeat it to the inside of my car.