Possible Bag by Richard Weaver

No one remembers how it started. It simply was
something that always happened. Part tradition,
part necessity. We never traveled without knowing
that each stop would be a series of repairs, a never-ending
journey of fixing things. A life spent answering
the questions of probability. My father found pleasure
deep in darkened televisions aglow with new test-patterns
of life and silent radios given voice again. He never tired of trying.
I knew from him that nothing was impossible. Every solution
was somewhere at hand. In the fingers. In the mind.
The patient offering of time. As a child I often held the work light
steady, though not always steady enough, while he searched
the arcane schematic for pathways towards life, or I held the meter
while his probes sought out an electrical pulse. He still tells the story
of the time I took apart a manual typewriter and 30 years later
it still sits in pieces in his workshop, a shining lesson in the method
of “how not to.” My sons bear witness to this, I have made them
my accomplices, just as my father did me. They are quick to believe
in the magic of simple tools and slow to accept the impossible.



Post-Covid, Richard Weaver has returned as the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. His work has also appeared in Conjunctions, Louisville Review, Southern Quarterly, Free State Review, Hollins Critic, Little Patuxent Review, Loch Raven Review, The Avenue, and New Orleans Review. Richard is the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and wrote the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005) which has been performed 3 times in Alabama, and once at Juilliard in NYC. 3 poems appeared in Alabama Poets (1990). He was one of the founders of the Black Warrior Review and its Poetry Editor for the first three years. Richard's poems are forthcoming in the Alabama Anthology (2023) and his 195th prose poem was recently accepted.