Cornelius Eady: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo by Yoon Kim

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Handymen

 

The furnace wheezes like a drenched lung.

You can’t fix it.

The toilet babbles like a speed freak.

You can’t fix it.

The fuse box is a nest of rattlers.

You can’t fix it.

The screens yawn the bees through.

Your fingers are dumb against the hammer.

Your eyes can’t tell plumb from plums.

The frost heaves against the doorjambs,

The ice turns the power lines to brittle candy.

No one told you about how things pop and fizzle,

No one schooled you in spare parts.

That’s what the guy says but doesn’t say

As he tosses his lingo at your apartment dweller ears,

A bit bemused, a touch impatient,

After the spring melt has wrecked something, stopped something,

After the hard wind has lifted something away,

After the mystery has plugged the pipes,

That rattle coughs up something sinister

An easy fix, but not for you.

It’s different when you own it,

When it’s yours, he says as the meter runs,

Then smiles like an adult.

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CORNELIUS EADY’s poetry collections include: Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize; and Hardheaded Weather (Putnam, 2008). He is co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation. [For more poems by and information on Cornelius Eady, click here.]

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Comments

[Clarinda harriss]

Cornelius eady never fails to deliver. What a great sucker punch. I feel it.

[Geoff Young]

He knows the trouble we've seen!

[Ralph Nightingale]

Splendid photo accompaniment.

[lally]

BAM! delightfully savvy and insightful...

[Mindy Kronenberg]

Wonderful! Evocative and amusing. (could this morph into a musical number?)

[Jiwon Choi]

I will embrace "spare parts" after reading this meditation on how everything can goe wrong when you're a renter turned owner.

[Anne Harding Woodworth]

There’s a sadness here, something raw and familiar, “after the hard wind has lifted something away.” Like childhood. The condescension of the “guy”—the easy fix is never for us, and he gloats. And he’s the adult? Thank you for this poem.

[Jack Skelley]

I've been there (in fact, the toilet is moaning now). But the poem elevates crisp images into a social dynamic... and brushes the deeper meaning of broken-ness. nicely done !

[A. Mulvihill]

Very relatable! Excellent poem.

[Tom Davis]

I like the rhythms of the language as well as the truth that relates, unfortunately, to my life exactly.

[Doug Pell]

Perfect accompaniment as I send a check to the plumber.

[Maureen Owen]

What fabulous images as similes converge!

[Eileen]

This is one of my favorites. Love his poems. 💕

[Grace Cavalieri]

"Then smiles like an adult."

How great is this. Cornlieus comes off Mt. Olympus to tell us the truth of our everydayness- turning pathos into pure pleasure.
Bless his plumbing now and forever.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

Bravo, Terence, for picking this poem by Cornelius Eady, a poet I’ve admired since THE GATHERING OF NAMES, his volume of poetry published in 1991 and for which he received a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1992. I’ve been following the verse of Eady ever since.

“Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket,” the poem I pasted below by Eady, was first published in the April 5, 2010, issue of The NEW YORKER. A decade later, Eady’s poem was republished in “Voices of American Dissent: An Archival Issue” of The NEW YORKER on July 27, 2020. This poem’s power has only grown stronger in the intervening years.

Dr. Earle Hitchner

EMMETT TILL’S GLASS-TOP CASKET
by Cornelius Eady

By the time they cracked me open again, topside,
abandoned in a toolshed, I had become another kind of nest.
Not many people connect possums with Chicago,

but this is where the city ends, after all, and I float
still, after the footfalls fade and the roots bloom around us.
The fact was, everything that worked for my young man

worked for my new tenants. The fact was, he had been
gone for years. They lifted him from my embrace, and I was
empty, ready. That’s how the possums found me, friend,

dry-docked, a tattered mercy hull. Once I held a boy
who didn’t look like a boy. When they finally remembered,
they peeked through my clear top. Then their wild surprise.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Earle, for this comment. Thanks also for adding the
Emmett Till poem, another great one.