Mather Schneider

December 30, 2016

“Our Morning Train” by Mather SchneiderPosted by

Mather Schneider

OUR MORNING TRAIN

My wife and I get up at 3 o’clock in the morning
and get ready for work,
drive in together.
She drops me off at the taxi yard
and then she goes to work at
McDonald’s.

It is dark in the morning and the streets
are mostly empty
at that time
and we are both tired
and feeling put-upon by
life, sipping our
coffee.

Along Aviation Highway
there are the train tracks
and each morning we look for the light
of the single eye of the train
coming through.
When we see the train we are both
happier somehow.

“There’s the train,” my wife says,
“Your favorite, now you won’t
be sad.”

“MY favorite?” I say. “It’s YOUR
favorite, you just don’t want to
admit it, the train makes you
all warm inside.”

“No,” she says, “not me, I am just happy
for you because I can see the light
in your eyes when you see
the train.”

“Oh, no,” I say. “You love that train,
Que niña!”

“Mira,” she says, “There’s the trenecito!”

The “little train” she calls it
though it’s not little at all, it’s huge,
bigger than life, deadly,
going somewhere.

“There’s your trenecito!” I say, “Aren’t you
glad?”

And we go on and on and it is
funny
because the truth is we both feel
better when we see that train.
Maybe that train is a symbol of somewhere else
we would like to be
a better life or future
for us.

The things that train
has seen, maybe that train is destined for some
beach somewhere
in Mazatlan or
Kino Bay or San Carlos and maybe
we both think about
that
sitting on a beach so far away
from this American drudgery, these small weak
creatures we feel
ourselves to be, this train that goes
through our hearts
always heading in the opposite direction
and with such surety to its movement
and pride in its horn.

It is probably all of these things
and none of these things
exactly.
Maybe it is just seeing a bit of life
moving at this ungodly hour
besides us
knowing that there are other poor shmucks
awake and working
when the normal human being
wants to be asleep.

Whatever it is, each morning
we look for that train

and when it is not there
we are both a little quieter

before that big
empty space.

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016

__________

Mather Schneider: “I am a cab driver who writes poems. For many years my wife and I would get up together and drive in to work and I got a few good poems out of those commutes. The symbol of the train, which calls out to everyone I think, and the tenderness of two people who love each other in what is often a dark lonely world are what made this poem come to life.” (web)

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April 13, 2015

“The Roofers” by Mather SchneiderPosted by

Mather Schneider

THE ROOFERS

She always wanted me
to get the roof fixed.
It leaked for years.

They came today
got right to work, I had to love that sense
of purpose.
I watched them for a while then felt like a fool
and came inside,
listened to the boots walking
all over my world,
the house shaking like a war
for hours,
me down here in my bunker
dust falling from the ceiling
and them up there
in the open
fearless,
balanced like little G.I. Joe dolls
on the edge of a bathtub
filled with hot tar, the hot tar

they mopped onto the surface
like heaven under
a black light
the stink of it, the nasty stink of it.

By late afternoon it quieted down.
I heard them laughing, and one guy
sweeping up my patio
like he owned the place, like some filthy
shopkeeper, whistling
a child’s tune

and when they drove their huge truck away
they didn’t even say goodbye.

I came outside
leaned my ladder against the house
and climbed up,
peeking my head up like a survivor
looking onto a quiet sunset
over a battlefield

and I thought,
it looks pretty good, but what
do I know

and I thought, a 4 followed
by 3 zeros

and I thought,
she still isn’t coming back

and I thought
now it will probably never fucking rain
again.

—from Rattle #46, Winter 2014

__________

Mather Schneider: “I write poetry because I’m too lazy to write prose.” (web)

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October 27, 2014

“Free-Form Bolero” by Mather SchneiderPosted by

Mather Schneider

FREE-FORM BOLERO

We eat nopalitos
for lunch
pruned from our hard yard

and we love the afternoon away
both of us hunter
both of us prey

then sleep.

I dream about pueblos
with names of women
and a smoky cantina with flowered curtains
and ironwood tables
polished by a million brown elbows.

The floor fan blows the hair on my legs
whispers chicken skin goodbyes
to my sweat
and as the heat rises with the finale of April
I am at peace with what will come:

wormy compost of May
foul-smelling hat
sunburned deeds
mesquite syrup and cactus jelly
sealed in jars like preserved lust

the throat-burning flames of bacanora June
sour stains of July
lime and onion tears
of August

the desert stretched out like an endless
mockery of self-importance.

Funneled into the triumph
of now

the sun floats down
into the other
a popped balloon at a gala ball

and as I wake up
it’s like I’m face to face
with the prettiest girl
at the last dance of the world

and she’s looking at me
like she just woke up too.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
Tribute to Love Poems

__________

Mather Schneider: “Well, I tried growing broccoli in our desert yard and that didn’t work, then realized that we could eat the prickly pear cactus that grew naturally right there in front. You prune the soft young pads, skin off the spines, boil them or fry them with salt and chili sauce or whatever you want, and there you go. This, combined with a nice siesta on a day off from work with the woman you love, is more than enough for me.” (web)

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August 14, 2013

“The Mermaid of South Mark Road” by Mather SchneiderPosted by

Mather Schneider

THE MERMAID OF SOUTH MARK ROAD

Her doublewide is plopped down in the desert
like a shipwreck
on the moon. She swats off
a pitbull,
paddles through the oily creosote
of her cratered yard
and bends
into my cab.
It looks like someone took an ice pick
to the front of her neck
which puckered when it healed
as if it wants a kiss.
Her voice comes straight
from her gut, a scissored
hiss, blended
with a phlegmy gurgle, horrible
to hear, and to try to
understand.
She was married once.
They used to go fishing together
back in Illinois
but he’s gone now breathing
someone else’s air
and there is very little water
here.
She tried going back home a few years ago
and ended up fishing alone
on her daddy’s old pond
with its green scummy skin
and not even catching a fucking catfish
while the gnats swarmed to her second mouth
and crawled inside her.
She thought if she fell in
she’d sink
like a stone angel.
That would probably have been best,
she says to me,
looking out the cab window at all the sand
of an ocean dead
for centuries
and rubbing her thin
dry arms.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012

__________

Mather Schneider: “I meet these people in the course of my job driving a cab. Some of them make me angry, some of them make me sick, some of them fill me with pity. The most interesting ones are a mixture, and I try to write about them. I am present in the poem, but I try to make myself and my presence secondary. There are so many lost and suffering people living in crags and shadows out here in the desert. You never know what you find when you turn over a rock.” (web)

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November 29, 2011

“Gutter Punk” by Mather SchneiderPosted by

Mather Schneider

GUTTER PUNK

A pitch black tattoo
covers almost her entire head.
Only a lightning streak of white
is left on her right cheek
like something frozen in an act of violence.

It obliterates her.

The ugly people look at her and hate her
for doing to herself what nature did to them,
for underneath you can see she had been a pretty girl.
They look at her like a cripple
would look at someone mutilating their own leg.

The beautiful people look at her
and silently feel superior

and even the heavily tattooed bikers
are at a loss for words.

She is marked forever
by all the pain and hatred of youth
turned inside out

and her eyes peek out of the blackness
like dew on an early grave.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006

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August 26, 2010

“Between Us and It” by Mather SchneiderPosted by

Mather Schneider

BETWEEN US AND IT

I’m a white American and she’s Mexican
but we’re trying to make it work.
We’ve moved in together.
There’s a dumpster outside our bedroom window
15 feet away,
a cement block wall
between us and it,
a gray cement block wall that’s full of air
and means nothing.
The dumpster belongs to the other apartment building,
the last of the expensive white ones
before it turns Mexican.
At night me and my girlfriend
are frightened by people
throwing things into the dumpster.
The noises are sudden and vicious, like thunder
or war, as if they are so proud,
as if it was the surest thing in the world
to be throwing away a microwave at midnight.
Later in the night we hear the Mexicans
taking things out of the dumpsters
to fix and resell.
The nights are hot in the desert in the summer
and in our sweaty sleep
the blanket on the bed gets pushed
and mashed together
between us.
We call it “the border.”
Even on the hottest nights we can’t
toss it away.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009

__________

Mather Schneider: “Like much of my poetry, this poem is 90% true. One very hot night me and my girlfriend, who is an illegal immigrant from Hermosillo, Mexico, were in bed pushing the blanket onto each other and back again, and it settled in the middle. She called it ‘The Border’ and I laughed. I knew there was a poem there. Then the image of the wall, dumpster, and connection to the other wall on the border of Mexico and the United States all came together with the idea of walls or borders between people themselves.”

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