He kept the award in the bathroom on a shelf with an old box of band-aids. It hadn’t always lived there. At some point, he was sure, it must’ve been out in the living room, maybe even the kitchen, he couldn’t remember the specifics, but after so many years, he couldn’t bring himself to pack it away, nor did he really want to show it off anymore. Too much time had elapsed. Thus the solution of the bathroom. At the back of that little half shelf with some first aid supplies and his glass jar full of cotton swabs.
But the other poets still remembered the award. Nobody had ever won anything like that in their little corner of the state. The Lincoln County News did a profile on him. They didn’t even interview him for it! It was fully reported out like a press release, and in it, they quoted a judge, something he could still remember like a curse: “He achieves such dynamic interplay between poetry and despair, the calibrated, hypnotic beauty of his line. Bleakness instilled with pleasure.”
For a while he wore his bleakness like a badge. But that got old. He wasn’t all that bleak, it turned out. Anxious, sure; depressive, definitely; but also he could be surprisingly funny at times, at least he thought so. Was it silly that he thought himself funny? But everyone wanted that bleakness. That hollowed bleakness of a poet who has stared down…
Oh, it was all a bit too much, and made his heart beat on the right side of his chest.
Then there was that strange censorship thing. He could still hardly believe the one book of poetry he published (and that hardly anyone read!) got banned. Censored and removed from any libraries that could serve children. Which was every library, wasn’t it? But the then-new administration wanted to make a point, and somehow those few sexy poems he’d written as a horny young man offended some people. Oh, well.
After a while, a group of poets volunteered to write a public letter of protest in an attempt to reinstate his book, but he discouraged this. Flattered, of course, that fellow poets wanted to step in on behalf of his little book, but no, he said it pained him that his country had disgraced itself in such a fashion and he didn’t want to draw attention. But that wasn’t the real reason. By then, he’d started to doubt the book, couldn’t really convince himself it was worthy of this effort. The book began to seem like a fake book to him, like when you look in the mirror and you’re like, is that my nose/how did I get that nose/that can’t be my nose/that looks like the wrong nose/is that even a real nose/what is a nose.
It had been years since he’d published anything. He knew people wondered, probably not all that often, what ever happened to that guy? What’s he doing now?
Well, this morning, after getting up in the dark, he saw the award out of the corner of his eye illuminated by the nite lite as he peed. Yes, this morning what he was doing was making a cup of coffee, as the wood stove heated up, and then he sat near the stove and began to write about a chair. He looked down at his notebook page, which for the moment was empty, but over the years, he’d filled notebook after notebook. What’s he doing now? He looked at the empty page and thought there was something there, already there — historical ways of writing about a chair, contemporary writing about chairs, writing both lauded and completely obscured, his own particular way of writing about a chair, cliched ways too, the culture’s entire repertoire of the genre of chair. If he was going to write a poem about a chair, he had to force his way through all the underbrush of inner images, because the poem had to emerge on its own, it had to come out now, in the present moment, this moment in the half dark as he got up periodically to tend the fire. He wasn’t sure he could write a poem about a chair, but here was a starting point and he thought, yes, he would start here, even if a point emptied of the past didn’t really exist. But this moment existed, and if he could disregard himself for perhaps forty-five minutes, he could be part of it.
That’s what he was doing now.
Jefferson Navicky is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands, a finalist for The Big Other Book Award in Fiction, as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose, which won the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in midcoast Maine.
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