The Art of the Lathe - B.H. Fairchild (Alice James Books)

Today's book of poetry:
The Art of the Lathe.  B.H. Fairchild.  Alice James Books.  University of Maine at Farmington.  Farmington, Maine.  1998.

1999 Pen Center USA West Poetry Award
1999 William Carlos Williams Award
1999 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
1998 National Book Award Finalist
1997 Beatrice Hawley Award

For many knowledgeable poetry fans it will be old news that B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe is a contemporary classic.  Today's book of poetry got Fairchild's gem in the mail yesterday and as a result we are sailing slightly off course today.

With our vast resources Today's book of poetry has started to gather foreign correspondents.  We currently have Otis wandering through the poetry cellars of Sicily searching for treasure, he will be returning soon.  Our latest addition to the staff is a trumpet playing be-bop artist from St. Louis, Mark Twang.

Mark grew up in reasonably normal environs but somewhere early on someone dropped a Pork Pie hat on his noggin' and he hasn't been quite right since.  Twang has been raiding his own vast library to send pieces of gold north.  Twang sent David Lee to our door and you will be hearing much more about Mr. Lee in the near future because he is a monster.  We had a thing, instantly, for David Lee. So we put him in the system.

The system wouldn't wait for B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe.  Today's book of poetry apologizes for not having read it before but you simply can't read everything, or find it.  Twang had sent us individual poems by B.H. Fairchild in his letters, along with quotes from Sonny Rollins and a couple of Crying Charlies.  Today's book of poetry was instantly convinced by those poems.  When The Art of the Lathe arrived we knew no one would object if Fairchild skipped his place in line.

The Art of the Lathe is an eye-opening deal breaker of extraordinary beauty.  Fairchild uses some deep sonar of the human spirit to get inside of the reader and then sets off bombs of reason.  The Art of the Lathe is the real deal.  When Twang sent it to us he included a note where he suggested that The Art of the Lathe may be the best, pound for pound, book of poetry he has ever read.  I happen to know for a fact that Mark Twang has read, and understood, more poetry than I have so I take his opinion to heart. That and he's been right about everything else he has told us.

So when The Art of the Lathe arrived I dug in.

Dear reader please believe me when I tell you that Mark Twang was right as rain.  The Art of the Lathe may be the finest book of poetry I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Body and Soul

Half-numb, guzzling bourbon and Coke from coffee mugs,

our fathers fall in love with their own stories, nuzzling

the facts but mauling the truth, and my friend's father begins

to lay out with the slow ease of a blues ballad a story

about sandlot baseball in Commerce, Oklahoma decades ago.

These were men's teams, grown men, some in their thirties

and forties who worked together in zinc mines or on oil rigs,

sweat and khaki and long beers after work, steel guitar music

whanging in their ear, little white rent houses to return to

where their wives complained about money and broken Kenmores

and then said the hell with it and sang Body and Soul

in the bathtub stroking their husband's wrist tattoo and smoking

Chesterfields from a fresh pack until everything was O.K.

Well, you get the idea. Life goes on, the next day is Sunday,

another ball game, and the other team shows up one man short.

They say, we're one man short, but can we use this boy,

he's only fifteen years old, and at least he'll make a game.

They take a look at the kid, muscular and kind of knowing

the way he holds his glove, with the shoulders loose,

the thick neck, but then with that boy's face under

a clump of angelic blonde hair, and say, oh, hell, sure,

let's play ball. So it all begins, the men loosening up,

joking about the fat catcher's sex life, it's so bad

last night he had to hump his wife, that sort of thing,

pairing off into little games of catch that heat up into

throwing matches, the smack of the fungo bat, lazy jogging

into right field, big smiles and arcs of tobacco juice,

and the talk that gives a cool, easy feeling to the air,

talk among men normally silent, normally brittle and a little

angry with the empty promise of their lives. But they chatter

and say rock and fire, babe, easy out, and go right ahead

and pitch to the boy, but nothing fancy, just hard fastballs

right around the belt, and the kid takes the first two

but on the third pops the bat around so quick and sure

that they pause a moment before turning around to watch

the ball still rising and finally dropping far beyond

the abandoned tractor that marks left field. Holy shit.

They're pretty quiet watching him round the bases,

but then, what the hell, the kids knows how to hit a ball,

so what, let's play some goddamned baseball here.

And so it goes. The next time up, the boy gets a look

at a very nifty low curve, then a slider, and the next one

is the curve again, and he sends it over the Allis Chambers,

high and big and sweet. The left fielder just stands there, frozen.

As if this isn't enough, the next time up he bats left-handed.

They can't believe it, and the pitcher, a tall, mean-faced

man from Okarche who just doesn't give a shit anyway

because his wife ran off two years ago leaving him with

three little ones and a rusted-out Dodge with a cracked block,

leans in hard, looking at the fat catcher like he was the sonofabitch

who ran off with his wife, leans in and throws something

out of the dark, green hell of forbidden fastballs, something

that comes in at the knees and then leaps viciously towards

the kid's elbow. He swings exactly the way he did right-handed,

and they all turn like a chorus line toward deep right field

where the ball loses itself in sagebrush and the sad burnt

dust of dustbowl Oklahoma. It is something to see.

But why make a long story long: runs pile up on both sides,

the boy comes around five times, and five times the pitcher

is cursing both God and His mother as his chew of tobacco sours

into something resembling horse piss, and a ragged and bruised

Spalding baseball disappears into the far horizon. Goodnight,

Irene. They have lost the game and some painful side bets

and they have been suckered. And it means nothing to them

though it should to you when they are told the boy's name is

Mickey Mantle. And that's the story, and those are the facts.

But the facts are not the truth. I think, though, as I scan

the faces of these old men now lost in the innings of their youth,

I think I know what the truth of this story is, and I imagine

it lying there in the weeds behind that Allis Chalmers

just waiting for the obvious question to be asked: why, oh

why in hell didn't they just throw around the kid, walk him,

after he hit the third homer? Anybody would have,

especially nine men with disappointed wives and dirty socks

and diminishing expectations for who winning at anything

meant everything. Men who knew how to play the game,

who had talent when the other team had nothing except this ringer

who without a pitch to hit was meaningless, and they could

  go home

with their little two-dollar side bets and stride into the house

singing If You've Got the Money, Honey, I've Got the Time

with a bottle of Southern Comfort under their arms and grab

Dixie or May Ella up and dance across the gray linoleum

as if it were V-Day all over again. But they did not.

And they did not because they were men, and this was a boy.

And they did not because sometimes after making love,

after smoking their Chesterfields in the cool silence and

listening to the big bands on the radio that sounded so glamorous,

so distant, they glanced over at their wives and noticed the lines

growing heavier around the eyes and the mouth, felt what their wives

felt: that Les Brown and Glenn Miller and all those dancing

  couples

and in fact all possibility of human gaiety and light-heartedness

were as far away and unreachable as Times Square or the Avalon

ballroom. They did not because of the gray linoleum lying there

in the half-dark, the free calendar from the local mortuary

that said one day was pretty much like another, the work gloves

looped over the doorknob like dead squirrels. And they did not

because they had gone through a depression and a war that

  had left

them with the idea that being a man in the eyes of their fathers

and everyone else had cost them just too goddamned much to lay it

at the feet of a fifteen year-old boy. And so they did not walk him,

and lost, but at least had some ragged remnant of themselves

to take back home. But there is one thing more, though it is not

a fact. When I see my friend's father staring hard into the

  bottomless

well of home plate as Mantle's fifth homer heads towards Arkansas,

I know that this man with the half-orphaned children and

worthless Dodge has also encountered for his first and possibly

only time the vast gap between talent and genius, has seen

as few have in the harsh light of an Oklahoma Sunday, the blonde

and blue-eyed bringer of truth, who will not easily be forgiven.

...

Today's book of poetry isn't much of a baseball fan and suspect that many of you aren't big ball fans either but we do know how difficult it is to dream the real thoughts of men and women and make them more than real on the page.  When Fairchild gets through with you it is almost possible to believe that the stories in his poems are your own experience.

As a recent convert to the House of Fairchild I have assigned Milo, our head tech, the task of filling all the missing Fairchild spaces on our racks.  He was able to find a copy of Fairchild's Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (W.W. Norton Books, 2003) on the shelves but that won't ever be enough.

Keats

I knew him. He ran the lathe next to mine.

Perfectionist, a madman, even on overtime

Saturday night. Hum of the crowd floating

from the ball park, shouts, slamming doors

from the bar down the street, he would lean

into the lathe and make a little song

with the honing cloth, rubbing the edges,

smiling like a man asleep, dreaming.

A short guy, but fearless. At Margie's

he would take no lip, put the mechanic big

as a Buick through a stack of crates out back

and walked away with a broken thumb

but never said a word. Marge was a loud

dirty girl with booze breath and bad manners.

He loved her. One night late I saw them in

the kitchen dancing something like a rhumba

to the radio, dishtowels wrapped around

their heads like swamis. Their laughter chimed

rich as brass rivets rolling down a tin roof.

But it was the work that kept him out of fights,

and I remember the red hair flaming

beneath the lamp, calipers measuring out

the last cut, his hands flicking iron burrs

like shooting stars through the shadows.

It was the iron, cut to a perfect fit, smooth

as bone chine and gleaming under lamplight

that made him stand back, take out a smoke,

and sing. It was the dust that got him, his lungs

collapsed from breathing in a life of work.

Lying there, his hands are what I can't forget.

...

B.H. Fairchild had some very rapt ears on his work this morning.  It is bitterly cold here in Ottawa today but our reading helped to heat up the office.  Milo, our head tech, was very dignified, Kathleen, our Jr. Editor, gushed.  Max, our Sr. Editor, harrumphed as he marched out into the cold but he was smiling when he marched back in.  Max gave us a world-class reading of "Body and Soul", Odin grinned from the corner.

Our foreign correspondent Otis is still in Sicily checking out wine cellars but he's scheduled to return later this week.   Otis also sent a note making sure I included him when the staff here at Today's book of poetry welcomed our newest member, Mark Twang.

After reading B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe I am now considering making all of our future staff take an oath of office by swearing on Fairchild.

The Art of the Lathe

Leonardo imagined the first one.

The next was a pole lathe with a drive cord,

illustrated in Plumier's L'art de tourner en perfection.

Then Ramsden, Vauconson, the great Maudslay,

his students Roberts, Fox, Clement, Whitworth.

The long line of machinists to my left

lean into their work, ungloved hands adjusting the calipers,

tapping the big lightly with their fingertips.

Each man withdraws into his house of work:

the rough cut, shearing of iron by tempered steel,

blue-black threads lifting like locks of hair,

then breaking over bevel and ridge.

Oil and water splash over the whitening bit, hissing.

The lathe on night-shift, moonlight silvering the bed-ways.

The old man I apprenticed with, Roy Garcia,

in silk shirt, khakis, and Florsheims. Cautious,

almost delicate explanations and slow,

shapely hand movements. Craft by repetition.

Haig and Haig behind the tool chest.

In Diderot's Encyclopaedia, an engraving

of a small machine shop: forge and bellows in back,

in the foreground a mandrel lathe turned by a boy.

It is late afternoon, and the copper light leaking in

from the street side of the shop just catches

his elbow, calf, shoe. Taverns begin to crowd

with workmen curling over their tankards,

still hearing in the rattle of carriages over cobblestone

the steady tap of the treadle,

the gasp and heave of the bellows.

The boy leaves the shop, cringing into the light,

and digs the grime from his fingernails, blue

from bruises. Walking home, he hears a clavier--

Couperin, maybe, a Bach toccata--from a window overhead.

Music, he thinks, the beautiful.

Tavern doors open. Voices. Grab and hustle of the street.

Cart wheels. The small room of his life. The darkening sky.

I listen to the clunk-and-slide of the milling machine,

Maudsley's art of clarity and precision: sculpture of poppet,

saddle, jack screw, pawl, cone-pulley,

the fit and mesh of gears, tooth in groove like interlaced fingers.

I think of Mozart folding and unfolding his napkin

as the notes sound in his head. The new machinist sings

  Patsy Cline,

I Fall To Pieces. Sparrows bicker overhead.

Screed of the grinder, the bandsaw's groan and wail.

In his boredom the boy in Diderot

studies again through the shop's open door

the buttresses of Suger's cathedral

and imagines the young Leonardo in his apprenticeship

staring through the window at Brunelleschi's dome,

solid yet miraculous, a resurrected body, floating above the city.

Outside, a cowbird cries, flapping up from the pipe rack,

the ruffling of wings like a quilt flung over a bed.

Snow settles on the tops of cans, black rings in a white field.

The stock, cut clean, gleams under lamplight.

After work, I wade back through the silence of the shop:

the lathes shut down, inert, like enormous animals in hibernation,

red oil rags lying limp on the shoulders

of machines, dust motes still climbing shafts

of dawn light, hook and hoist chains lying desultory

as an old drunk collapsed outside a bar,

barn swallows pecking on the shores of oil puddles--

emptiness, wholeness; a cave, a cathedral.

As morning light washes the walls of Florence,

the boy Leonardo mixes paints in Verrocchio's shop

and watches the new apprentice muddle

the simple task of the Madonna's shawl.

Leonardo whistles a canzone and imagines

a lathe: the spindle, bit, and treadle, the gleam of brass.

...

Today's book of poetry is thrilled to travel back to 1998 to bring you this masterwork.  Make no mistake, B.H. Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe is as good as it gets.

B.H. Fairchild

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B. H. Fairchild, the author of several acclaimed poetry collections and a recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, has been a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bobbitt National Prize. He teaches in the creative writing PhD program at the University of North Texas.

BLURBS

“The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic—a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched. . . . Workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music. . .”
     — Los Angeles Times

“With elegance and restrained subtlety, Mr. Fairchild interweaves topics that become something like musical themes, including the central theme of machine work. . . . Anyone who can lay claim to the authorship of this much excellent poetry wins my unqualified and grateful admiration.”
     — Anthony Hecht

B. H. Fairchild 

at VCP Poetry Series

video: Wayne Linberg

alicejamesbooks.org

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