Divinations VI: Bolts, Friendly Ghosts, & the Opportunity to Tilt

“It’s the Vari-View all over again.”

Welcome back to our sixth (and penultimate!) episode of the Divinations miniseries, featuring an ongoing conversation in poems with poet Sandra Yannone.

In this episode, Sandy shares her poem-in-progress, "By Years the Obstacles, at Night the Scars," inspired by my "Articles of Incorporation" from Episode 5: Pockets, Tooth Fairies, & the Surreal Real, as well as by the Little Oracles lexical fragment “bolt.”

By Years the Obstacles, at Night the Scars
by Sandra Yannone | A work-in-progress poem

So I turn into a mystic
seeking to be the metal key
that unlocks locks, or better
yet, never going near
physical ones, just prying
open any urge to wonder,
to shepherd that converse
with others. It can happen
in any dark-horse city at any time —
Vermillion, York,
Walla Walla, Kalamazoo —
at any underdog motel check-in
or eager roadside diner
over any unassuming meal. Watch.
You unbolt your mouth
to release a sound,
then close it before
you speak to create
a space for the voice
sitting next to you. You
confirm this method
when the hardware
store in your hometown
cannot make a duplicate
key to save anyone’s life,
or, more urgently put,
to your father’s stained glass studio.
You return three times
after three different clerks
make adaptations
to the previous key.
You never knew
making a replacement
required a kind of magic,
but now the Ace
Hardware on Main Street
has you reconsidering
why you have trusted
ground-down grooves
on a metal shaft
to grant you entry
into the unknown that exists
behind any door. And what
about those locks that can’t
possibly possess keys? I’ve seen them
lately on a drive to Providence.
I stop at the scenic
overlook, overgrown, off I-95
on the edge of Mystic.
Bolted to the rusting
chain-link fence that suggests
preventing anyone from jumping
to the train tracks below,
hundreds of padlocks dangling
in the salty, Mystic air.
The mystic in me seeks
a placard, a sign, an historical
marker, anything to reveal
what’s behind this random curtain
of padlocks occupying the chains
like bird shadows populate a wire.
Not even Houdini could hide
that many lock picks
inside his mouth to dare
escape. I can manifest
no logical or illogical
explanations for what I witness.
I drive away to Providence.
Weeks later, I still see a ghost
image of that scarred roadside
fence waiting for some
mythical smith to unbolt all
the locks from their Mystic burdens.

We talk about vintage toys as metaphor, learning to love line breaks, the “I–you" matrix, and more. And as a special treat, Sandy gifts us with a reading of “The Next Open Space,” which will appear in her forthcoming collection, The Glass Studio, published by Salmon Poetry in early 2024. Plus, I offer an excerpt from my response poem to her featured reading — the very last one of the series, dropping on December 19. You can find the full transcript here.

xx, aa