Encounter groups about the present sprang up
even in rural areas. People learned
to laugh together and let go
of empty relationships. Everybody held hands.

In religious shows on TV fat women
with rouge like bruises on their cheeks
and men with silver wigs who looked dead
sang never mind about yesterday,

Jesus loves you as you are. Operators are standing by
scrolled left to right under their feet.
On TV someone was always standing by
or shooting somebody or being shot

or telling jokes or saying don’t delay
and be sure to act now. For suddenly,
it seemed to be all the present all the time.
Yet not even the present just happened

without the contributions of a number
of pioneers: Cher, for instance,
who experimented with gels and plastic surgery
to develop a face impervious to change,

the journalist who brought history into the present
by discovering that a bill signed
in Washington or a good day on Wall Street
were actually “historic moments,”

the manufacturers of automobiles
that made the future as near
as the neighborhood showroom.
For lacking them -- and the creators

of multi-tasking and e-mail,
and the first voyagers into cyberspace,
bringing to that starless darkness
web-sites, on all the time at the same time --

we would never have known
that the whole idea of the past
could become a thing of the past;
we would never have had, in short, today.

Home

Under bands of light
in the long hall, the old
woman walks, her face

bright as if she knows
where she is going
and dull again and bright

and dull again; she turns
and walks the other way.
The man in #203 stands

in the back field
all afternoon calling
the hired man. Johnson

is also the name of the one
in the wheelchair
though he would not

respond to it, now reduced
to the question
on his face: What

happened to me?
Near him in the lobby,
squinting, Do I Know You

leans forward, and beside her,
face fastened
to an oxygen tube,

I’m Scared. They don’t
raise their eyes to the TV,
jumping with its

fake life. Three times
a day they hold
their forks and do not

eat their food. And when
the family arrives, tourists
from a country they’ll never

see again, they can’t think how
they have ended up
in the home

where they are all
homeless, or why
they are waving back

to those they hardly recall,
or why their visitors
are smiling.

Wesley McNair is the author of four books and a chapbook, all in print, most recently Talking in the Dark and The Town of No & My Brother Running, a dual reprint. The recipient of grants from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, he has won two NEA Fellowships, prizes in poetry from Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Yankee magazines, the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, and an Emmy Award. His poems have appeared in over forty anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize Annual, and two editions of The Best American Poetry. In 2001, his first book, The Faces of Americans in 1853, for which he won the Devins Award, was reissued as a Classic Contemporary by Carnegie Mellon University Press. During the spring of 2002 Carnegie Mellon will publish his book of essays on place and poetry, Mapping the Heart. His new collection of poems, Fire, will be available from Godine in April. For more information see www.wesleymcnair.com.

 Wesley

 McNair