Unalienable Rights
Copyright© 2012 by Robert McKay
Chapter 16
It was about 5:30 when Cecelia appeared at my side. She can move so smoothly and silently that, though she rarely tries to sneak, she might as well – she just shows up where she's going. I was in the middle of trying to make sense of what a lady – apparently a grad student in the English department – was saying about Byron's poetry. I'm not a big Byron fan, and if I didn't like what I do of his poetry on its own merits she'd have turned me right off. What little I could understand made it sound like he wrote poetry the academic way – by the numbers. I suspected that was just the lady's analysis, since even the stuff that I don't like reads better than that.
Cecelia listened for a few seconds, nodded her head once, shook her head twice, and laid her hand on my arm. "I'm glad I'm asking you this," she said with a slight smile. "Do you happen to have any 'hip pocket poems' about you this evening?"
"I've got one or two I know by heart, but nothing in my pocket," I said. Her term was an adaptation of something I'd picked up from the pastor when I was a member of a black church in Dallas. He'd spoken of a "hip pocket sermon," a sermon that you can preach at the drop of a hat without prior notice.
"Jeffrey would like you to read a poem or two before the featured poet," Cecelia said. "If you wanted to write something, I could carve you out some private space."
"Now that's an impromptu invitation," I said with a grin. "Have you been promoting me? 'Cause if you have, you been doin' it for free – you ain't my agent an' ain't gettin' no 10 percent."
"I have not boasted of your accomplishments tonight; Jeffrey's desire to hear you springs, apparently, from past comments I have made, and what he has read for himself. And you know that I find your poetry quite good; it isn't the style I prefer, but I do enjoy it independently of our relationship."
"Yeah, you enjoyed that one piece to death." I smiled at the recollection of the scathing review she'd written. "Why don't you find me that private spot? I can't guarantee to come up with anything in 20 or 25 minutes, but I'll give it a whirl, and if not I'll fall back on my memory."
"Very well." She didn't have to ask me to go with her; she dropped her hand to mine and just barely tugged, and we were off through the crowd like we'd been practicing. And Cecelia can get through a crowd, when she takes a notion, like an arrow cuts through the air.
I don't know that Cecelia had been in the house before, but it didn't take her long to put me in what appeared to be a private study at the back of the place. There was a lock on the door, one of those straight edged deals in the doorknob that you turn, and I locked myself in while Cecelia went back to let the professor know I was going to do something for him. There was plenty of paper, and I always have a pen in my pocket, so materials weren't a problem.
The problem was that I don't write on demand. I turn out a poem when the idea hits me – sometimes so hard that it seems like an axe between the eyes. And if the idea's not there, I can't write. I'd never make it writing potboilers – I can't turn the words on and off the way such writers can.
I roamed the room, looking at things. It wasn't as cluttered as the stereotype tells us professors' offices are, but it did have a nice, relaxed, lived in disarrangement that reminded me of how my study had been before Cecelia moved it to the garage, and was beginning to take on again. A lot of the books on the shelf were completely foreign to me, texts on literature, scholarly stuff that I wouldn't understand if I read it. There was a lot of stuff that I knew of by reputation too – Faulkner, Capote, Mailer, Heller, all the big names of American lit. Some of it I knew favorably, especially Hemingway, though I found that Benton had consigned Papa to a hard-to-reach corner as though he didn't think much of Hemingway's writing.
Here and there on the shelves and walls were pictures – Benton with all sorts of people most of whom meant no more to me than photos of minor European nobility would have. Some of the faces I recognized – our current governor, Bill Richardson; the city's current mayor, Martin Chavez; Senator Pete Domenici; other people who were famous for whatever reason. And then the idea came. I hurried to the desk, and sat down and scribbled over the paper. I didn't have time to do it right, nor to revise it well, but I thought that what I produced was serviceable. I could introduce it with an account of how it came to be, and that would excuse a lot of problems that a less hurried genesis would have eliminated.
And then came a knock on the door, and Cecelia's voice. "Darvin, it's time."
I unlocked the door and opened it, and Cecelia took my hand. "Ready or not," I told her, "I've got something I can do."
"Then you are more ready to read poetry than I am," she said. "You know my level of expertise."
"Yeah – a couple of points below none at all."
"You're being far too kind, my husband. I can analyze any poem you care to place in front of me – but I can't write poetry, not at all. I am altogether destitute of talent in that regard."
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