Jackson Wheeler

Ars Poetica
Because I was sung to as a child. Because my father shot himself when I was ten.
Because my mother took in ironing and worked as a janitor so that social services would
not take the children away. Because, my mother would say, she could turn on the radio
and I would lie in the crib and listen, quiet as a mouse. Because there was singing on
the radio: Kitty Wells, The Louvin Brothers, The Stanley Brothers, The Carter Family,
The Stoneman Family, and when I was older, Saturday afternoons with my father’s mother,
her dark Indian eyes glittering in the twilight of the room – boxing from
Chattanooga, Tennessee, announced by Harry Thornton. Because I watched my uncles
slaughter hogs, because I watched my mother kill a chicken for dumplings, because I
watched the Rescue Squad drag the Nantahala Lake for drowned vacationers, up from
Florida. Because Southern Appalachia was imagined by someone else – I just lived
there, in the mountains until I read about it in a book, other than the King James Bible,
which is all true my mother said and says, every jot and St. Matthew tittle of it. Because
God is a burning bush, a pillar of fire, a night wrestler, a swathe of blood, a small still
voice, a whisper in Mary’s ear, conceiving. Because my family is full of alcoholics, wife
beaters, spendthrifts, and big-hearted people, who give the shirts off their backs.
Because their stories lie buried in the graveyards, because their stories have been
forgotten, because their stories have been misremembered. Because my father’s
people said they were from Ireland, down Wexford way. Because my father’s father
baptized people, because my father’s mother bore a child out of wedlock and was part
Indian. Because my mother’s father got his leg crushed at the quarry, because my
mother’s mother died of brain cancer in her 50s. My friends think I talk too much, don’t
talk enough; that I’m too queer for company that I’m not queer enough. My mother’s
people were Scots and Welsh, three cheers for the beard of Brady Marr, three cheers
for the blood on the shields of the Keiths from Wick, three cheers for immigration, the
waves of it and the desperation behind it. Let’s hear it for King’s Mountain and the
Scots’ revenge for Culloden. Three cheers for extended family, the nameless cousins,
all the petty griefs and regrets, the novels never written, the movies never made, the
solace of the bottle, the solace of sex, the solace of loneliness of which there is plenty.
All hail the poetic arts, and the art of poetry and the knowledge at the heart of it all:
Words bear witness.