Al Maginnes What Is Always With Us

What Is Always With Us

Language is our problem child, forever refusing to confess what it knows, or connect the frayed ends hanging between us. Maybe that’s why there’s comfort in a dialect you don’t know, in the angles of their mysterious grammars, the blunt stones of sentences. The wrong word forever waits to be said, but today I listened to a woman sing ballads in French and understood each note she intoned in a way allowed only in the most perfect conversations. “Toujours le temps,” she murmured, and I shivered at the small table in the small tavern her voice built. Between sets we might exchange those low, knowing sentences spoken by those who know themselves so well they have no need of translation. A trucker who picked me up thumbing said, “Start talking and I’ll put the hammer down,” and we highballed through two states. That was one night. But another night I got in the car, frantic to reach the hospital four hours away where my wife lay. There was no one to talk to but I found a radio station with a signal that stretched from there till dawn. I can’t recall one song that played that night, but if I heard them again, I would know every word.

Al Maginnes

Al Maginnes has published four chapbooks and eight full length collections of poetry. His ninth, The Beasts That Vanish, will be out fall of 2021. Recent poems have appeared in Lake Effect, Xavier Review, American Journal of Poetry and others. Al lives in Raleigh and teaches at Louisburg College in Louisburg, North Carolina.