Reliable
Speculative Friction
By Claire Bateman
Reliable
Outside their trailers
in dense evening light,
the fed men gather to jack and block
their cars’ known bodies.
They speak a strict truth
of shaft and strut, choke and bolt,
coaxing out the first obedient spark
that leaps night after night at a piston’s stroke
and has nothing to do with going anywhere.
Note: This poem was first published in Claire Bateman’s The Bicycle Slow Race, Wesleyan University Press, 1991.
The image used to illustrate Bateman’s poem derives from http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/video-boy-racer-caught-nightvision-2297193.
Claire Bateman
Claire Bateman’s books include Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose); Locals (Serving House Books), The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan University Press), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), At The Funeral Of The Ether (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Leap (New Issues), and Coronology (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences such as Bread Loaf and Mount Holyoke. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. (Please see Bateman’s amazon.com Author’s Page for links to all her publications, and go here for further information about the poet and her work.) (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)
2 Comments
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I know these guys–I’ve seen them eat a sandwich with one hand and drain the oil with the other.
Claire Bateman
Not a bad way to live, really!