Ch. 11: Poetic License (page 2)
by Emmet
“Short-term solution,” Jazmynne said dismissively. She looked around, taking in my walls of books. “Wow. You must like to read.”
“Well, I am an English teacher,” I said. “Gotta know my subject.”
Jazmynne glanced at a stack of books I had left on a side table, various collections of short stories I was going over to recommend for inspiration to my creative writers. She picked up a collection, Twenty Under Thirty, contemporary stories by writers only a few years older than my students. “I never could get into short stories,” she said. “Or fiction, really. What’s the point if it’s not true?”
“So what do you read?” Chris asked.
“She doesn’t,” Barry said.
“I do,” Jazmynne retorted. “Factual stuff. Wall Street Journal, The Economist.”
“Quoth the CPA,” said her brother. “I’m obviously the artistic one in the family,” he said to me.
“Well someone had to be practical.” She returned the book to the table.
“What about poetry?” Chris asked, winking at me.
“Poetry?” Jazmynne gave a hollow laugh. “I just don’t see the point. Poems are always obscure, hard to understand, and don’t really do anything in terms of affecting humanity or anything.”
I had to say, “Even Shakespeare?”
“Well especially Shakespeare. I mean, the guy died like, what, 500 years ago, his plays are impossible to understand, and not particularly original.”
What was there to say, other than, “Shall we go to dinner, then?” I remembered I’d made reservations at a vegetarian restaurant. I could change it, I thought, but something about Jazmynne made me feel less than accommodating.
At least the restaurant had eggs, so Jazmynne acquiesced to stay. But the time there went no better than it had in my house. Over the course of the evening, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the accounting and financial planning businesses, and Jazmynne learned absolutely nothing about me, because she never asked me a single question about myself.
That night, I dreamt of Grace. I dreamt that I woke up and she was lying next to me in bed, but it wasn’t the me now, it was the me then, it was a 17-year-old me. I was the same age as Grace. I wasn’t in my bed now, I was in my bed in my parents’ house in Minneapolis, and she looked at me and she smiled and said, “I wondered when you were going to get here.”
And then I woke up alone, in my grown-up bed, a 40-year-old man, yearning for a not-quite-17-year-old girl. Not the way I wanted to go at all. Not what I needed in my life, not part of the plan. But there was a poem that came to me, just some fragments of words, and I jotted them down.
Dawn breaks
heart wakes
twenty stories reflecting silver slivers rose of sun.
Day has begun
again.