#3: The Poet

"I'm always surprised to see where they go." He slurred his words, tongue too slippery with wine. "When I sit down to write them, they are wondering and lost. I bring them in, my children, and make poems out of them."

Mari was finding it harder and harder to enjoy this man whose words she had devoured so selfishly for years before. Glasser had written a slender book of poetry, Slave Heart, that had been like a bible for her and her friends in college.

"It's like God has made me a god for them. Proud, and petulant, you know." His eyes half-closed, his cigarette dangling dangerously between the tips of his fingers.

"But you know this, my child. You know or you wouldn't have come so far to see me, for us to meet this way." He nodded at Mari, almost falling out of his seat. Those surrounding them at the big table in the middle of the bar laughed and cackled at the performance they knew this man to deliver every night he came out.

It took the heater a while to warm up in the car as she drove home. "I am sorry, Mari, but I warned you he'd be this way. He always is," Cera said. "In some ways, I wish I had never taken this position, you know. It breaks my heart to see him this way. I mean, Rick Glasser, you know? The only poet I ever loved, a pathetic self-obsessed drunk. This is the worst internship I can imagine. Tomorrow morning he'll pile grant work on me and pretend this night never happened."

But Mari didn't know what she was talking about. She was hardly listening to her friend. She had seen a depth of pain and sorrow in the man who had written that tome of heartache. She was moved by the way the world inflicted him all over again.

Issue Six Index