DRIVE TIME
by Don Mager
ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-122-7
Poetry Chapbook, ~40 pages, $10
Don Mager (b. Santa Rita, NM, 1942) completed high school in Des Moines and went to Drake, where his poetry mentor was E.L.Mayo. He was among the first poets to complete the graduate writing program at Syracuse University where he studied with Delmore Schwartz, Phillip Booth and George P. Elliott.
Besides the books listed here, he has done substantial translations of Rainer Maria Rilke, Frantíšek Hrubín and Anna Akhmatova. Marc Satterwhite’s opera Akhmatova with a libretto by Mager is planned for production in spring 2004.
He is the Mott University Professor of English at Johnson C. Smith University, where he has taught since 1986. His journey between Syracuse in the mid-60s to Charlotte, included 3 years in rural England, a commune in upstate New York, and 15 years in Detroit. He has been a farm laborer, camp director for senior citizens, door-to-door interviewer, radio show host, day care center director, and human rights lobbyist on behalf of sexual minorities.
He shares his life with William McDowell and is father of two sons and grandfather of two granddaughters.
Fog
I drive up over the high span in fog
and see strings of moving lights below,
white one side, red the other, like people
hang on eaves and porch posts, or in zigzags
on bare limbs. These lights flow in pairs. Each takes
a life to work, forward in its story,
or back home. Trips to Ashville or Cary.
Someone heads to a funeral, short notice,
half a country away. Another took
a wrong turn, and two exits up, wraps back
through merging roads, long after I head down
the span into fog, my lights a milky
wall, no pair of red eyes to lead the way.
Their stories are as wonderful as mine.
Light Taps
For Diana Pinkney
Getting darker, the road is not busy.
Hoping for rain, I am in no big rush-
a light shower-nice for driving-with news
on the radio. First splotches, slickly
can mix with old oil, we are warned, and in a
full skid, as if outside myself, I see
myself watch the car slide. Just in time, I
remember "tap brakes lightly." But does the
driver headed toward me in his lane-there
with his headlights on-also remember?
Nearly at a stop, I edge back over
to mine. He passes. Rain is heavier.
I switch the dial from the Iraq bombs
to music. I'm in no rush to get home.
Rap
For Scott Douglass
Out of the ordinary, alongside,
a car pulls up in this ant-line. I look
across. Like neighbors, light to light, for blocks,
we creep. Their boom concusses air inside
my closed windows. Four boys (weave, cap turned,
dreads, white rolled up doo rag) rock their torsos
like jerky metronomes, and their wide mouths
chant the virility of unbroken
uncompromised joy. Clasping the moment
as if the throbbing bass were the heartbeat
of the cosmos and they rode its center,
they rap along one voice joined together.
I switch off the news on my radio
because theirs is plenty enough for now.