A Friday Afternoon In Upper Michigan, 1976

If I tell it with detail, I’m truly a liar
because I was fast asleep in the rear
seat of a silver Ford LTD as it plowed
straight ahead into the face of a truck,
turning improperly in front of us
on highway 2, in upper Michigan.
And my brother, driving for the first
time on a long weekend road trip,
swears he must have been drifting
to a guitar strumming on the radio
while my father, staring deep into
the tamarack trees, was watching for deer.
And the faulty driver, a hick who
had radioed for help, swears it was me
who spoke to him at the scene of the crash,
and I told him to radio for an EMS.
And if I tell it right from this point
on in the story, I’ll drift into conjecture,
which is the other side of a trauma
trying to fit its puzzle pieces together.
If my father died in that car crash, it
would have been right in the sequence
of seconds after impact, when his
forehead cracked against the dashboard,
and a roar replaced the music in his ear
for the rest of eternity. And if this
part is true, the red trickling of blood
draining from his forehead would have
been a cardinal, flapping a fragment
of his brain rhythms up into tree branches;
and for a half second, long enough
to reconsider his name, my father lingered,
and was probably yanked down to road
level by me, as I rubbed his cheeks
into awakening. And if my brother died,
it would have occurred somewhere after
the steering wheel jammed a large circle
on his chest, like a cattle prod. And maybe
his spirit disentangled itself from its fleshy
synaptic bearings, like a buzzing whorl
of summer gnats over the two lane highway.
And an EMS, racing out of St. Ignace,
would have chased him back into his life.
And if the other guy croaked for an instant,
it would have been as he was leaning over
the gear shift, shuffling for papers on route
to the Mackinaw Bridge, maybe with a load
of worries on his mind. And perhaps it
had been a spell since he’d seen a shiny new car
like that, up here in Northern Michigan,
where the roads stay glazed over with tar,
shimmering, and sunlight glinting off trees.
And if I myself died, it would have occurred
in small doses over the last twenty odd years,
maybe losing portions of my memory,
like liquid words trickling out of my brain,
until I decided to seal it up, like an old wound.

66 Pages
$15
isbn 1-882983-87-4

In his wonderful poem, “Midlife,” Ken Meisel confesses, “Everything I remember always speaks loudly to me.” And we are fortunate that Meisel translates those languages back through the illuminating power of his own clear voice. Sometimes the Wind takes us not only to where Meisel’s images would have us go, but also somewhere farther out, somewhere higher. The subtle trick of this collection’s beauty leaves us asking, as we would of a magician, “How’d you do that?” Meisel takes the wind and rivers and even sunlight, among other things, and pulls from them a magic that was always hidden there, as though this first collection were a book of tender spells.
—Jeff Vande Zande
Editor of The Driftwood Review
and author of Transient

Ken Meisel’s poems have appeared in over forty poetry journals including Free Lunch, Rattle, River Oak Review, Parting Gifts, Sulphur River Literary Review, 360 Degrees, The Wayne Literary Review, The Heartlands Today, and The Driftwood Review. In addition to writing poetry, he is a marriage and family therapist. He lives in Dearborn, Michigan, with his wife and daughter.