T A K E H E A R T
A Conversation in Poetry
Edited & Introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate
Poet Stuart Kestenbaum of Deer Isle is director of the Haystack School of Crafts, one of the state’s cultural treasures. His poem for this week remembers his father, a Mr. Fix-It who couldn’t.
Mr. Fix-It
By Stuart Kestenbaum
My father never made anything or
fixed anything, even though we had
the obligatory tools in the basement,
the beautiful hand drill that belongedto my great grandfather the carpenter,
the once-used brushes and the mysterious
cans of paint and shellac. And he never
cooked anything either, never turnedthe coffee pot down to perk,
never cracked an egg and only once
that I remember barbecued steaks,
the smoke rising to heaven like a burnt offeringfrom the charred remains. When he returned
home at night, the smell of gas and oil
still close to his clothes, he’d settle on the couch
finishing a New York Times crossword puzzle whilekeeping track of the Yankees on TV, until he
fell asleep, only to rouse when I’d change the channel.
“I was watching that,” he’d mumble, though asleep,
and I’d believe him, but now I think he wasn’t therebut had been at his domestic work, the night shift,
dreaming the lives of his children,
building a house of words, writing
the perfect story whose ending we never get to.
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2007 by Stewart Kestenbaum. Reprinted from “Prayers & Run-on Sentences,” Deerbrook Editions, 2007, by permission of Stewart Kestenbaum. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to David Turner, Special Assistant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at poetlaureate@mainewriters.org or 207-228-8263.
Beautiful.
I guess I am a barbarian, to an extent. I think the piece is nice. I wouldn’t call it beautiful, as Ms. Leopold has, but it is nice to read. I don’t think it is poetry. It is prose. It is a string of sentences that could have been put end to end and read as a paragraph. Merely breaking the text into four line stanzas does not make it a poem. I figure many will consider that my aesthetic sensiblities are somewhat stunted.
Bill. I agree with you. But then I usually do.