Trumbull Ave.

By Michael Lauchlan

The well-crafted lines in Michael Lauchlan’s Trumbull Ave. are peopled by welders, bricklayers, gas meter readers, nurses, teachers, cement masons, and street kids. Taken together, they evoke a place—Detroit—in its bustling working-class past and changeable present moment. Lauchlan works in the narrative tradition of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson but takes more recent influence from Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, and Ellen Voigt in presenting first- and third-person meditations on work, mortality, romance, childish exuberance, and the realities of time. Lauchlan presents snapshots from the past—a widowed mother bakes bread during the Depression, a welder sends his son to war in the 1940s, a bounding dog runs into a chaotic street in 1981, and a narrator visits a decaying Victorian house in 1993—with an impressive raw simplicity of language and a regular, unrhymed meter. Lauchlan pays close attention to work in many settings, including his own classroom, a plumber’s damp cellar, a nurse’s hospital ward, and a waitress’s Chinese restaurant dining room. He also astutely observes the natural world alongside the built environment, bringing city pheasants, elm trees, buzzing cicadas, starry skies, and long grass into conversation with his narrators’ interior and exterior landscapes. Lauchlan’s poems reveal the layered complexity of human experiences in vivid, relatable characters and recurrent themes that feel both familiar and serious. All readers of poetry will enjoy the musical and vivid verse in Trumbull Ave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780814340974

Michael Lauchlan

Michael Lauchlan’s poems have appeared in many publications and have been anthologized in Abandon Automobile (Wayne State University Press, 2001) and A Mind Apart. His earlier collections are And the Business Goes to Pieces and Sudden Parade.

Book preview

1997.

Trumbull Ave., 1981

The bounding dog may have been a Dane.

Memory does not retain the breed, save

that his large frame bulged with muscles

and he ran with the happy grace of athletes

beyond praise and blame and score. The sun

hammered that broad anvil of Detroit—

the squinting hookers; the wan wild kids

up from Tennessee; black kids one step

from Alabama; the old Armenian

who ran the cleaners, who still wept

for dead parents and his young bride

seventy years after. As for me—strange

to waken each day into the same life,

or, now, into the sequel of the story—

I stood, half blind from cooked

concrete and flashing windshields,

near the burned apartment where a kid

had been killed and others sniffed or

shot or swallowed whatever they could

and fell into some drastic sleep. The dog

came from a side street chasing a mate

or just running from sheer canine joy—

the old Ford invisible to him as

God’s fist. Poised on the ruined hood,

a most sudden sculpture, he died fast.

Slab

Screeding the wet cement, dragging a board

over the forms, he works the gray mass flat,

then, with the wood float, rubs the stones

deep into the slab, letting the smooth grains

rise to the surface. Later, he’ll smooth it

with a magnesium, then broom it

and pour a potion of curing fluid.

He straightens to rinse the lime

from his gloves and pants, to wash

the chalky residue from the drive, to let

his back release its knot of pain.

A small boy is practicing the crossover

as he walks to the schoolyard court,

the ball slapping against the echoing street.

A woman shouts into a phone, tires wail,

and from a world gone quiet, traffic

asserts its buzz of engines, brakes,

lawn mowers, and the familiar "pop—

pop—pop" where talk has broken off.

Water Heater, 18th St.

In a half cellar, dim, with a dirt floor

wet from sewage and a bad water heater,

one smell, sharper than the rest,

wrinkles the nose of the plumber.

Teeth grind, the scalp tingles—

he waves a pipe wrench at the frozen rat

and steps boldly again. Pipes cut, he

drags the old heater up the block steps to the alley

while the sun drops behind charred row houses,

their walls opened, staircases, banisters

leading to rose-papered sleeping rooms.

Two men stop him, offer sockets,

ladders, drills—cheap. Silent,

he removes a pipe from the heater,