I first became aware of Todd Boss’s poetry about 10 years ago, when he was featured at a Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets conference. His work amazed me right from that first meeting. He had published a book, yellowrocket, which I’ve read and re-read several times. It’s a fantastic collection. Here’s one example, “To Wind a Mechanical Toy”. Right from the start you’ll find one of the hallmarks of Todd’s poetry, the random rhyming, showing up here and there, always a surprise, and always just the right word in the right place: mind/wind, mention/tension, ratchet/catching, matched/scratched, on and on throughout the poem and throughout the book.
Then there are the sounds. Take this gem of a stanza from section ii:
“even our laughter, clunky from the
dusty hurdy-gurdies of our hearts,”
And finally, I marvel at what Boss does best. Starting from the everyday, the mundane and taking us to the profound. Enjoy this poem. Buy this book.
To Wind a Mechanical Toy
i is to mind it. To wind between
finger and thumb a thing too
inconsequential to mention
is to find the essential tension
that divides the living from
the dumb. To grind some gizmo
into usefulness, the ratchet
catching against the paul
(much the way a match scratched
against a wall of flint is minted
into flame), is to come directly
into a kind of small (but
no less existential) bind:
To bring a thing into motion
(whether it be a diversion or an
ocean) is to draw one’s bow
across resistant strings
(and yes, I speak for the Creator
when I broach this notion),
for everything’s radical that is.
To exist at all is to feel the clock-
steady undertow of inertia.
My mother had a music box
I loved when I was a boy.
I loved to twist its comical key
and set its tiny tines into play
across its rubbled metal drum.
I loved the way, ere long,
its song lost the muscle of its
wound copper coil and how
sublimely sound surrendered
to a well-oiled but untimely
end. The pressures of applied
and implied stress impressed me.
The tune was Edelweiss, I
think.
(Bless my
home
land
for-
…)
Repeatedly melody’s tendency
to resolve succumbed
to a far more commonplace
dependency: the exquisite
frictions of applied physics.
ii Yesterday a friend asked me,
Why is it so hard to be happy?
She asked it very generously,
but I didn’t have the energy
to crank my pretty little theory
out of its filigree box. “Life
sucks,” I said. We laughed, but
even our laughter, clunky from the
dusty hurdy-gurdies of our hearts,
was half over before it started,
and in truth it wasn’t a genuine
mirth. (You know the worth of a
good laugh when you have one.
Often I find I get one in the car,
about five hours into a trip. Any
quip or observation or country
song can set me off by then.
The best laughs are deep down
in the odometer.) I don’t know
what to say to her. Shouldn’t
things get easier? Why don’t we
love better fragrant than fresh?
That romance traditionally
blooms in spring is one of love’s
greatest plays on words—a twist
that untwists as trysts turn to
marriages, marriages to mists.
iii For Christmas last year my boy
got a Schilling tin toy from
Santa Claus. Guess who got
more play time out of its
wind-up spiral elevator, chute,
and tumblers? These gadgets
aren’t actually made for children,
so of course by New Year’s Eve
I had it broken, but that’s when
the real pleasure began:
to find a glue that favors tin
was my first endeavor. Then,
to re-install the fallen platform
not just where, but better than
it had been mounted before,
that was the second. Then,
when the glue was still drying:
trial-runs one and two and three;
the adjustments they required;
the removal of the part and its
re-reinstallation; trial-runs four,
five, six, and seven … I finally
had it up and running, but who
cares? By then I’d had my fun,
all alone at the dining room
table, the kids asleep upstairs,
Times Square crowds counting
down, and another ball falling
from the past and into the future
through the gimcrack contraption
we call our monthly calendar,
but which is actually the rise
and fall, the ease and pull,
of the solar, lunar, and stellar
mechanicals of the universe,
locked in their epic argument over
which is bigger, which is stronger,
who started it,
and how, if ever,
it will end.