Thirds
posted February 8, 2009
“So, do your poems rhyme?”
Ethan stared at the woman who had asked him. She was much taller than Ethan and curled her torso over her drink in order to peer downward at him through lethargically half-lidded eyes. Her forearms lay flat on the bar, palms down and fingers extended, as if to keep the surface from sliding away. He appreciated this. The woman’s posture reminded Ethan of a kind bird, or a friendly robot, and suggested that she was stepping away from a very important set of thoughts to acknowledge him.
“Some of them. I adore rhyming poetry, but I sometimes feel that rhyme can bring too much attention to the words themselves. If the idea of the poem isn’t in the sound of the words, rhyme can be distracting.”
Ethan was lying. All his poems rhymed; he wrote poems by starting with clever-sounding sets of rhyming words and then filling in the rest. When he read his poetry aloud, he rushed through each line and landed heavily on every final, rhyming word. He always emphasized this word by pausing for a moment afterward, glancing at his audience to make sure it had its proper impact. Rhyming was essential to Ethan’s poetry. He had, however, recently noticed that none of the other poets on the open-mic circuit were as diligent about it. He had then read some very intelligent-seeming articles on very intelligent-seeming Web sites, which he now repeated to the woman in front of him.
The woman nodded slightly. “I think I understand.”
Ethan felt the conversation slide back toward him. He understood that it was his turn to say something. He had approached the woman because he thought she was attractive. He hoped that she might be impressed by meeting a budding poet. Ethan’s foresight extended only as far as the revelation that he was a poet. The vulgarities of conversation were not part of Ethan’s plan.
When Ethan didn’t say anything, the woman said she would listen and wished him good luck. Her kind, robot-bird head rotated away from him to stare downward into her drink. Ethan finished two more cheap beers before the MC announced his name.
Ethan noticed his hand beginning to shake as he fished bills out of his wallet and abandoned them on the bar. He glanced back at the bird-robot woman, who was still engrossed by her drink, and felt his pulse quicken as he lumbered toward the small stage. Suddenly conscious of his audience, he tried to remember how to walk normally but could only manage a jerking, mechanical gait. He climbed three steps up to the low stage. He positioned himself behind the microphone. He cleared his throat; he pulled a crumpled wad of poetry from his pocket; he flattened it with his fingers. He read a poem entitled “King for a Day”:
Oh, how I would like to be king for a day… (pause, glance)
Life would be so different if it were that way…
I'd get rid of TV and taxes and ties…
And spend the rest of the day with you, dear, eating pies.
While some people snapped, he told himself to work on shortening the last line.
Ethan’s quota was three poems. He read “Slowly and Deliberately,” a long poem about a murder, and “Ode to Sandwiches,” in which every line rhymed with bread. He glowed slightly as he climbed the three small stairs down off the stage. Smiling and still shaking, he glanced around for the kind robot-woman, whose face would convey surprise and delight. She had already left.
Ethan left with just one more drink. He began the three-block walk to his apartment building. One third of Ethan was constantly in despair over his ineptitude as a poet, but two thirds of him succumbed to opaque delusions of grandeur. The latter two thirds held a much more positive message for Ethan, so he was barely conversant with the more pessimistic third. While his hope motivated him and sent him to open mics twice a week, his anxiety manifested in subtler ways: he fidgeted and demolished his fingernails while he wrote; he never invited friends of family to hear him read. His fear of failure also caused his hopeful aspiration to overcompensate, to write more enthusiastically and prolifically. As he unlocked his apartment’s door and sat reflexively at his laptop, he became more optimistic than he had been in months, far more optimistic than he should have been.
He conceived a string of short, interrelated poems. They came to him simultaneously in an explosive rush accompanied by adrenaline or endorphins. The poems encircled a character, a man slightly older than Ethan. They contained peripheral glances at the character’s life from the points of view of the people and objects in it. The character was never directly revealed in any of the poems, but together they depicted him completely. The concept made Ethan mumble urgently while he wrote down ideas and fragments. A barista spoke of the character’s physical grace; a photocopier sensed his loneliness. Ethan estimated that the theme contained at least thirty poems. A roommate secretly admired the character; a couch couldn’t stand his hairstyle. Ethan left his mouth slightly open, slightly moving, while he typed.
He stopped when too many yawns made it difficult to stay on the home keys. He lethargically considered his work. His poems did not rhyme, and he was proud. His pride, however, concealed from Ethan that only one third of him wrote the poems. While he wrote, the remaining two thirds of Ethan imagined the cover of his published book, his parents' ecstatic faces, and referring to copyediting as his “day job” in the past tense. His feverish anticipation distracted him from the urgency of writing. Ethan slept.
At his next open mic, Ethan’s beer trembled while he ignored other poets. He did not try to start any conversations, but searched the bar with his eyes for the bird-robot woman. When he eventually read, he read two of his new poems and one older poem. One of them included these lines:
Loneliness emanates
Like heat from a toaster.
I sympathize.
Ethan was still trembling slightly as he took the three steps off the stage. He ran into two chairs and a stool on his way back to the bar. When he arrived, before he could order a drink, he noticed a man seated next to him. The man was unabashedly staring at Ethan. When the poet looked up, the man said, “You are a seriously mediocre poet.”
Ethan pretended to be confused. In a moment of detached curiosity, he compared the man in front of him to the character he had recently created. Either the physical appearances of the real and fictional men bore substantial similarity or Ethan’s character was underdeveloped and pliable. The man continued.
“It’s alright. You can stop doing this shit. Keep writing poetry if you want, but you're not good enough to insist that other people listen to you.”
Ethan arranged his face into a depiction of bewildered disgust. Two thirds of Ethan finally took notice of the remaining third, bowed their heads and truckled. Ethan believed for a moment what he had partially already known; he saw his poetry clearly for the first time. He stared at his character and felt relieved, comfortable in his predictable failure. He knew that he would not take the man’s advice, that he would keep writing poetry and dragging it to bars like this one, but he no longer had to pretend to be good.
Without adjusting his expression of feigned offense, Ethan left the bar and stood still in the night’s cool darkness.