Maude stood in front of the mirror and looked at her reflection looking back at her. The reflection and the original inspired no lines of romance or poetry. The faces persisted in normalcy, so average that to call it average was a disservice to the truly, desperately average people of the world.
She stood in an average bathroom. It was white. Maude wished it were more poetic, that her life and circumstances could be summed up in flowing verse with metaphor and allegory. Instead, her life was much like the bathroom. But just because it wasn’t transcendent didn’t mean that it didn’t have purpose. Maude would argue that the mechanics of a car engine was in its own way a lyric poem (that is if Maude knew what a lyric poem was).
Maude’s father was dead now and he knew everything about poetry. He loved it all about and understood none. He read Blake and Shelley, laughed with O’Hara and wept with Whitman. He read “Heart to Heart” every Valentine’s Day and imagined that Rita Dove was his ladylove. He would sing “its neither red/nor sweet” wrong and strong, his voice filling the house. These tomes lined the walls of his auto repair shop, the same shop Maude inherited when he died. She inherited the books too.
The day after he died, Maude opened a worn copy of selected poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson. She had heard of Tennyson of course, he had named her by proxy. When Fred Harris first laid eyes on his squalling infant daughter he declared her Maud. The nurse who filed her paperwork mistakenly added on an “E” to the end of her name to her father’s regret.
“Come into the garden Maud,” he would beckon, though they had no garden only a tiny apartment over the shop.
Maude read Tennyson with no understanding. Her childhood was filled with poems about love, nature and God, which she found elsewhere. Her God was in the machine and in the engine and in the axles. Poetry didn’t inspire her the way it did her father, but he died. So the day after, Maude sat in her father’s office and read.
The next day, she sat in the same office and tried to write a poem for her father. Maude though to herself, “How hard can it be?” After all, her father alone seemed to own hundreds of poetry books and pamphlets, so it couldn’t be so hard if everyone was doing it. She sat at her father’s desk with a pen and paper willing the words to come. For a time, she watched as the dust particles danced in the sun’s light as it filtered through the window and imagined her father sitting in this very spot pontificating on the virtue of virtue and how Dickinson had the right of it.
In preparation, she had researched different kinds of poems and procured a list: sonnets, diamante, haiku, and ballads. She tried a haiku:
My dad is dead now
He liked the Mets and the Knicks
He was big and round
The poem was factual and descriptive and the rest of her attempts followed suit. They told the truth, they were just bad. She hadn’t expected to write bad poetry and even she with her limited scope knew that she had written utter and complete rot. Still she would honor her father with a poem. She chose the least offending of the lot to read. Her father’s friends and acquaintances were unlikely to know the difference.
Maude practiced reciting the poem in front of the mirror in her white bathroom. She practiced it as she lay under cars, she practiced it on line at the bank and she recited the words as she marched up the center aisle of the church and brushed past her father in his casket. She stood before all these people, grasping the sides of the podium until her knuckles went pale. She looked down at her father’s casket and recited words, not pure in form but pure of heart, about how odd her father was, how much he loved poetry and how much she loved him.
Becoming Writer 2016 Anniversary Contest 