Daytona 500

by Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Where we’re from, we know ballet as Dale Earnhardt
gliding through the traffic of Daytona; we know dance

as our hands moving across a table of drunk Miller Lites.
This is universal because I say it is. When my mother called

me Kayleb for the first time, I remembered the haunted house
on Clifton Hill, how she was tugged away by a hired actor.

I screamed until they took us out the fire escape. To care
is to call a name. To care is to call your mother’s name,

as your father pulls at her ankles. Dear Ma, you know your
hands were always too blue in the winter, strapping snow

chains onto the Ford Expedition. This is a happy memory
because it’s a memory. It is warmer now. Blame global

warming, blame the divorce. It doesn’t matter. All that
matters is the heat of the sun, and both being here to feel it.

“This poem is about tenacity, industriousness, and my appreciation and love for my mother. Most of my poems, really, end up being letters of admiration to my mother’s strength.”
—Kayleb Rae Candrilli

Kayleb Rae Candrilli is the author of Water I Won’t Touch (Copper Canyon, 2021), among other titles. They are the recipient of a Whiting Award as well as fellowships from the Pew Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts.

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In the previous post, these words were quoted from Jean Baudrilliard’s essay, Radical Thought:  What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis.  Only this spirituality of language can justify writing. 

This poem, Daytona 500, demonstrates a poetic analysis, a spirituality of language in the references to the sensation evoked by witnessing Earnhardt’s black Chevrolet thread the needle through traffic at the Daytona Speedway.  Ballet indeed.  Another form of dance — friends buzzed, telling stories, laughter around a table of empty Miller Lites.  (No imported Stella Artois here…) At this juncture in the poem the author offers directly to the reader:  This is universal because I say it is.  How true that language is courageous interpretation of experience asserted into the world.

The remainder of the poem for the most part is composed of bitter-sweet memories, with a concluding remark about “all that matters.”  The pivot point of the poem is the two concatenated statements about care.  Language is an expression of what we care about, and how we care.  To care is to call a name. To care is to call your mother’s name,..

Therein lies the spirituality of language.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

                                         – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, 1922