Albert Bristol Maginnes
Poet
"My plans for the fellowship money are simple - - I will use it to take time off from teaching so I can write some poems. I feel this is an important time for me as a writer because I have recently published my first collection of poems and completed a second. My work seems to be pushing me in a new direction, and time and money will allow me to explore that territory. The fellowship will give me the time to concentrate, for the first time in my career, completely on writing."
Al Maginnes received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas and a BA in English from East Carolina University, in Greenville, NC. He is an English Instructor at Wake Technical Community College, in Raleigh, where he lives.
Return to the NC Artist Grant
Award Recipients for 1999-2000
The Challenge
Not my first trip down that road diving
and twisting off the black-top. But this was night,
so I could’t see the thundercloud of dust
our tires broiled.
One of these tarpaper-sided houses
was where my mother picked up and dropped off Lee Ann
who twice a week cleaned our house and watched my sister and me. Tonight my father drove. In the front seat stretched a silence
longer than the few miles between our house and hers.
On the back seat beside me rested a box of toys
my parents had decided my sister and I no longer needed.
When I rode here in the daytime, I leaned
into the front seat to watch Lee Ann's chickens,
dirty feather-clouds, cluck and scatter. One day
the summer before, her neighbor stood from chopping weeds
to mop silver sweat-gleam from his face,
and I asked, How do black people get to be black?
They’'re born that way. My mother hushed me
more quickly than Lee Ann shut her front door,
offering no glimpse of her life down here.
When my mother tried the next day to explain the difference between races, I was simply relieved to learn
I couldn't turn black the way Mr. Bryan had teased I would
if I spent any more time in the sun.
My father stopped the car in front of Lee Ann's house.
We'd never parked before. Usually the pale dust
of our arrival barely settled, falling motes whirling
in dense sun, before the car made its pivot
and churned out again. But my father picked up
the box of toys, followed Lee Ann across
her moon-washed yard. I walked silent in their wake. Few details of that room I'd stretched to see into
return now. The man and two women
in the front room went silent at our entrance,
their talk strained to polite, uneasy smiles.
Then the children, two girls and a boy my age, appeared from the back hall, rubbing their eyes, clinging to the sleep dark they, half-dressed,
had walked out of. Their eyes fumbled
from the box on the floor to me and back.
I could have tried to initiate them
into the best use of each toy, showed them
how to repair the airplane's wing when it fell off,
to substitute pennies for missing game pieces.
But facing each other across quiet deeper than child-shyness,
our silence carved one more chapter
into our inherited history of silence.
The boy finally spoke, answering Lee Ann's attempts
to coax a thank you. I can whip you, he said
so quietly it had to be true. When my father laughed,
the other man dared a dawn-slow smile. Lee Ann's son, encouraged,
slapped the air until his mother's single warning
froze him. This was Alabama in 1963,
still not place for anyone black, no matter
how young, to challenge anyone white.
When we left, my father's headlights cast
all that lay before us in bold, white relief,
the rest dropping into shadows too thick
to see the end of I have traveled some distance
from that place, yet in the child-time that knows
only present-tense, I will always be there, the challenge
I cannot answer still in front of me.
And his raised hand, palm-flesh so close to mine in shade,
still maps the shared condition sun cannot bleach or bum away, this thing we have still not thrown away or outgrown.
Elegy With Clifford Brown Playing Trumpet
after Larry Levis
In the mystery I'm reading, Clifford Brown
may or may not have left behind more music,
something worth speculating for those who love
as I do how the quick angles of his playing sound new light on a tune's surface
the way sun finds new faces in the quick-peaking roofs of waves.
For the last month I've been reading the elegies
Larry Levis left behind,, searching through them
as if the words, the bone-white space
between words, harbored his death. Somewhere
in those laments for seasons, for ancient horses,
for a world that is filled, not emptied, by loss,
lurked the hand that will come one day to touch us,
perhaps when we are right in the middle of things,
& leadlead us into a puzzle of streets
that we only understand slowly we will not find our way out of, although that matters
less & less as the blacktop buckles & thins
to cobblestones, then to dirt, as we walk out of our shoes until we are walking on nothing at all & then
we are not walking at all & the way back to all we have left undone is forgotten.
One person has already died in this novel
& others probably will, failing in the unremarkable way
characters die in fiction--to further some plot need or because they have outlived whatever use
the author invented for them. Larry Levis once said
that when his first book was published he waited to become famous & did not write for a year,
a necessary silence he outlasted.
More than once, in the throat of some dark arena,
riding the frenzied pulse of a rock and roll band,
I made myself believe that somehow
we would, player & listener, outlast silence, the moment's fever suspended & stretched drum-head tight, the body held fast inside
the skin of the minute. But the band always stopped.
House lights came up like a dirty imitation sun
across a quiet so deep & sudden it seemed like deafness,
the audience one-minded & numb, shuffling to the exits, leaving behind blankets, wine bottles, every brand of litter.
And there were always two teenaged girls
from a town three hours away, abandoned by their rides,
& one could not stop crying long enough to say her name.
Walking our new dog this afternoon, I watched her chase
the ink-black birds that gather on the sun-painted hill
behind my house. They scattered in quick distorted flight,
notes from one of God's unwritten solos.
I watched the dog chase first the birds, then their absence,
reminiscent of how we chase the dead, trying at last
to pin them down, as if their lack of motion
might halt our confusion. As day has burned
to its cold end, as my hand has chased
the quick-flying birds of my intention down the page,
I've been listening to the recordings of the Max Roach -Clifford Brown bands of the fifties. I'm going to listen
to the tunes Clifford Brown recorded the night before
the car crash that killed him, then silence, the place every note of music, every word,
even this one, finally falls down to.
Ghost Fleet
Hatteras, N. C
In a shop filled with mounted sand dollars,
postcards and plastic pirate swords, they buy
a map that locates and names every craft
that ever went down off the Outer Banks.
Back in the car, he again rakes up
the story about the time he and a friend,
real dollar poor, dredging bottom muck for clams
uncovered a cache of sand dollars,
the only live ones he'd ever seen and these mating,
flat sides pressed together, the bristly hairs that covered
their bodies hooked so they made a tearing sound
coming apart. She's heard this story before,
but the recitation makes his voice a pleasant drum
against the rain and slow mist that conspire
sails of fog. High narrow beach houses loom
out of the murk like ships nameless and miles off course.
This morning, they woke and made love, then slept
to wake and make love again. Only a few weeks ago,
he left quiet as fog without saying why, steered
by the notion that his life had quietly blown off course.
Anchored by time, by habit, by all his siory has no words for
he returned, hoping they had not become wreckage,
a vessel vanished so long ago only a name, a date remained
the way people are only names at first, faces
that give no hint of the rooms sealed behind them.
The map rolled in her lap reminds her
of her childhood nightmare of never being born,
of the life she knows going on without her
and no voice remarking her absence.
And his story, drifting to its familiar end, requires at least her presence: he and his friend bleached the sand dollars and tried to hawk them on the boardwalk,
a constellation arrayed across a dark towel. They did not sell one. Walking home that night,
they set their harvest on cars, fence posts
in the middle of intersections. The largest one
he saved, threaded a nail through its hole
and hung it over his bed. It still hung, tiny moon, over the bed he slept in when they first met.
The nights he was gone, her bad dreams
of absence returned, and she drove for hours, avoiding the stale harbor of their house
to navigate streets she didn't know, to forget
how simple the act of coming apart can be,
how easily the best built craft becomes ' wreckage, one more name the ghost fleet carries.
Punishment
When William Byrd arrived
at his lodgings late and found
the door locked, his servant gone to bed,
he recorded in his journal
that he woke the men and beat him.
Byrd neglected his prayers that night
but noted that he enjoyed
"good health, good humor &
good thoughts, thank God Almighty."
Almost three centuries later, my student slams
her hand like a joyous gavel
on her book, declares any man
who beats his servants unfit to read.
Each generation sees all that came before
reduced, the way things seen
through the wrong end of a telescope
shrink beyond our view. When my father told me that he and my mother did not sleep together
until their wedding night, my laughter
must have struck him like a fist.
How do we defend old sins
except to say it was done that way
then? I wince when I recall
my response to my father, a kind man attempting what guidance he could.
For years I could not give
my family's dinner-table talk a rest
as I put the whip to war,
racism, poverty, all the evils I considered my parents the sleeping disciples of
One day I will be lifted
from my own long drowse to learn the banality of all my good intentions.
And when the blows fall on my back, punishment for being a lazy servant,
won't it feel good to be the one
lifting the lash, convinced
of the justice in each blow?
[Welcome] [Home] [North Carolina Arts Council] [Links & Lists] [Maps & Trails] [News] [Art & Artists] [Feedback] [Index]