the poet by Paul Maliszewski
I think I know about naps, the poet said. Thank you, though. The poet’s wife started to walk out of the room, but got only as far as the doorway before she turned around to face him again. I stay out for as long as the baby can stand it, she said. But we do need, at some point, to come home, you know? I’m not talking about naps, the poet said. My god. The poet’s wife was silent. She would let the poet do the talking. It was the only thing to do, really. Just let him go and go until he tired of it. Or else leave. Not that anything changed anything. You see the trouble, the poet said. Don’t you? She didn’t, but she didn’t say. I never know when I’m going to get any time, the poet said. That’s what makes this so hard for me. Maybe I’ll get an hour tomorrow. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll get a little time next weekend. But maybe not. How can I work like this? the poet asked. The poet’s wife just listened. The answer is I can’t, the poet said. I can’t work like this. It’s just no way to work. The poet’s wife suggested some new way they might eke out a little more time for him, both during and in between the naps, at least on the days when she was home. She would do anything for him. She wanted to make that plain. And she wanted her husband to write this essay. It was important. That’s what she told him. I want us to find a way, she said. I want to make this work. It doesn’t matter, the poet said. It’s not going to work. Nothing will work. Even when you two leave, I have to do so much to get you ready to go that by the time you actually clear out of the apartment, I feel too tired to do much work. What the poet said was and was not true. He tended toward melodramatic overstatement, especially when trying to be persuasive. He didn’t have to do that much, not really. He did feel tired, though, but then he always felt at least somewhat tired. In the end, the poet failed to turn in his essay. He failed even to start the thing. That was the sad truth. After all those months—how many exactly he didn’t want to count—and he had not written a single word. All the time his wife gave him, her support, her patience, her forgiving him his moods and his impossible brooding, plus all the editor’s understanding, and the poet still had nothing. He had spent so much time reading and note-taking, never mind the time he then spent organizing his notes. It was absurd. Maybe he had just been stalling all along. The poet had to wonder. Did he need the notes? Did he need them typed? He had wasted so much time. Maybe he just got bored. Or maybe the idea grew old and, in his mind, started to seem like something he’d already written. Sometimes still he burned with the idea. A little fire that rose and fell. He could feel it. He considered
making one last push, a final attempt to get the thing done, but after dragging all his books and research out and sorting them into neat stacks on the kitchen table, he decided he didn’t have it in him, he just didn’t. The poet wrote the editor, telling him the bad news, and a few days later, the editor responded. Very sorry to hear this, he said. Why don’t you send me what you have, though? Maybe we can figure something out… The poet stared at the ellipsis at the end of the editor’s message, trying to divine what those dots might entail, what he could do and what the editor would then say and so forth. He thought he might tell the editor the truth, or something close to it. Instead he told him that his writing, what he had, was just too bad to show. It’s really, really rough, he said, in its current state. I’m sorry, but I’d rather just pull the plug on the thing and be done with it. A few more days passed, and the editor wrote back. Plug pulled, he said. Be well. The poet imagined then that he might start to write in short forms, the epigram, say, or maybe the couplet, but that never worked out either. He could never say anything much in a line. He did, however, start one new poem. He had only a couple of lines in his head, yet they seemed to hold some promise. For several days, he thought of the words, repeating them to himself, listening to the sound they made. He wanted to give them a chance to build, to grow, to become something, but when nothing seemed to be happening, he opened a new document on his computer and just typed the words in already. The man was tired, he wrote. Too tired even to sleep. That was it. It wasn’t complete, but that was all he had. Over the next two weeks, he went back and looked at what he had done, tweaking what was there, bending the lines first one way and then another, breaking them into even smaller pieces only to put them back together again, exactly as they had been before. He elaborated and embellished plenty, but then ended up deleting his efforts until he was back with just those original two lines. Nothing new ever lasted long. As he worked on the poem, he thought chiefly of himself. Once, while staring at his nine words on the screen, he thought of those small lead weights used for fishing, sinker weights. He imagined them secured to a thin line and then hooked into his face, right beneath his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. The weights stretched his skin, tugging at his features, pulling them down. That was how he felt, he thought. He just didn’t know how best to put it. The more he read the poem, though, and the more he worked those two lines over, the more self-pitying he found the entire undertaking. Everybody is tired, he thought. Everybody is always tired. Eventually, he just quit the thing. It was stupid, he told himself. For the first time since he was a teenager, the poet started to keep a notebook, just a place to jot down
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