Automotive
by Kevin Prufer
I keep returning to the image of a kitten
asleep in the engine
as a way of understanding
the history of my country.
So warm under the car’s hood,
the hidden sweetness in the dark machinery.
+
Start the car.
+
[The sound the kitten makes.]
+
Happy slaves on a lazy afternoon
sleeping in the shadow of haybales.
A banjo lying in the sun.
Stolen apples.
​
A lithograph on the wall in my father’s office:
“The sweet ol’ summuh time.”
+
My mother bought me a kitten.
I brought it home in a cardboard box
and how I loved that kitten,
the way it purred in my arms
and pressed its cold wet nose against my cheek.
+
Start the car.
+
In a poem by Jorie Graham,
history is a hand grenade lodged in the pulp of a young tree.
The tree grows, the tree grows.
One day, a farmer chops it down for firewood.
Imagine his surprise when the grenade—
+
[The sound the kitten made.]
+
​
My mother promised me a kitten,
but it escaped,
scurrying into the distant past.
+
I used to think history moved inexorably forward
from villainy into truth,
but the kitten was nowhere to be seen.
I stood on the porch and called into the wind.
Only the car cooled in the driveway,
its engine ticking.
+
All those kittens asleep by the haybales—
they had had too much to eat,
and now they wanted a warm place to relax.
The sun bore down upon them.
+
The grenade explodes as resentment, as rage,
as the final expression
of unredressed wrong.
When the kitten licked my ear
I laughed and fed it treats.
+
Start the car.
+
What did I know of evil?
My father worked long evenings in his study
so I could go to school.
I had a safe childhood. Don’t make me feel guilty
about that.
I’m not guilty of anything here.
+
[That sound.]
+
They had stolen the apples and the time,
but in the distance you could see
their master walking from the barn,
scowling—
Lazy, lazy. Oh, you lazy….
+
Anyway, I loved that kitten
and when I couldn’t find it,
I panicked
not because it was a metaphor for the history of my country
but because I loved its little pink tongue,
the way it washed its paws—
+
The engraving hung upstairs, in his study.
In the early evenings, the sunlight hit it,
a bright red square
before I was born.
+
The grenade keeps exploding
into my adulthood.
​
+
I’m just going to run to the store for groceries,
my mother said.
You kids behave.
You kids be good until I get back.
Its little pink tongue. Its cold nose.
The jangle of car keys.
​
​
​
Automotive appears in my newest books of poems, The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). It’s the only poem in that book not to see magazine publication, partly because it was a last-minute addition to the collection. Its origin comes from two seemingly unlike memories.
First, a memory of a 19th century engraving I saw as a child, a troublingly sentimental image of enslaved people apparently happily sleeping and dancing instead of working. That print bothered me and stayed with me in memory.
Second, a friend who, not knowing a kitten had crawled into his truck’s warm engine, killed the kitten when he started the truck. I felt sparks between these two memories. Somehow, the fact of slavery made anodyne (and comic) in the engraving felt like that kitten curled inside the engine of American history—a false image of joy and sentimentality paired with its own cry of pain and death.
I suppose, finally, the poem is (partly) about the persistence of historic evil in the mind of the state, though we may have sometimes tried to diminish it through sentimentality or willful blindness.
​
Share:
....................................................................................................................................................................................
KEVIN PRUFER'S newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and Sleepaway: a Novel (Acre Books, 2024). Among his eight other books are Churches, which was named one of the best ten books of 2015 by The New York Times, and How He Loved Them, which was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press. Prufer’s work appears widely in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Paris Review, and The New Republic, among others. He also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long forgotten authors. www.kevinprufer.com