Hardware by Ronald Wallace (with commentary)

My father always knew the secret
name of everything–
stove bolt and wing nut,
set screw and rasp, ratchet
wrench, band saw, and ball
peen hammer. He was my
tour guide and translator
through that foreign country
with its short-tempered natives
in their crew cuts and tattoos,
who suffered my incompetence
with gruffness and disgust.
Pay attention, he would say,
and you’ll learn a thing or two.

Now it’s forty years later,
and I’m packing up his tools
(If you know the proper
names of things you’re never
at a loss) tongue-tied, incompetent,
my hands and heart full
of doohickeys and widgets,
watchamacallits, thingamabobs.

http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~WALLACE/poems.html

My speculations on heaven and hell and mortality began at an early age, generated in part by my father’s illness. Paralyzed with multiple sclerosis for most of my life, my father appears in each of my books, often in multiple poems. When my first book was accepted and I realized that my father would be seeing the poems about him for the first time (and they didn’t always present him or our relationship in the best light), I asked him, in the nursing home where he spent his last years, whether he’d prefer that I remove them from the book. He said something that has been very important for my writing. He said, “I’ve felt so useless to anyone over the years that if I can be of some use to you in your writing it would make me happy.”

Appropriation of other people’s stories, and the exposure of friends’ and family’s lives, has always been a vexing problem for writers, so my father’s permission was liberating. In the poem, “Hardware,” written after my father’s death, I acknowledge his importance for me as a kind of “tour guide” and “translator” of the foreign country of adulthood, suggesting that no words are finally sufficient to accommodate the enormity of his loss. Faced with such sorrow, the heart has only “doohickeys and widgets, watchamacallits and thingamabobs” with which to try to make do.

Filed Under Poetry | Leave a Comment