The friend who was in Korea during my post office crisis has returned with the news that she’s accepted a job offer there. She doesn’t leave till the end of the month, but we met tonight for our last or second to last evening. Though I’m really excited for her, I will miss her very much because she is one of my closest friends. She is also the person with whom I spend most time at the bookstore, and she has a knack for turning metaphors into disconcerting social events. Today, for instance, Puntitas learned that writing a dissertation is like a bowel impaction that requires much time at the toilet, a considerable amount of grunting and groaning, sundry medical consultations, more straining, sweat, pushing, heaving, fiber therapy, enema therapy, and a final surging-tearing-thrusting-expelling passing through. Puntitas learned too that she didn’t have to eat all of her refried beans and that she’d lost her craving for a dessert of flan.
After dinner and coffee, we came back to my house to talk more about my friend’s new job and all the packing, selling, and storing she’d have to do before the move. As we were sitting in my study, where my manuscripts live in their yard-tall Federal Express boxes, she asked if she could read my work. This wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time I said yes (except for the one time I showed her something in progress [after much begging on her part] and got annoyed at her lack of workshop skills). Today the experience was very different.
Initially, it was boring because my friend just read silently, giggling or making the odd Hmm or huh.
Then it was mildly annoying when my friend suddenly started commenting on one of the poems, a sonnet. A word was misspelled. The final image didn’t make sense. The speaker wasn’t very sympathetic. The annoyance was not about the feedback itself, which was useful. It was about the insistence. Puntitas was done with the poem. Yes, she’d revised it the weekend before. Still, she was done, and she had finished, and the only thing she had any interest in doing with it was putting it in the mail. Then that indifference was its own revelation, and Puntitas sat back to let time keep on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.
Several hours or minutes (depending on the specific time continuum) later, my friend went back to reading, and the experience got interesting. As she read, my friend announced the title of each poem. She giggled or grunted as before. This time, however, she also read lines or images out loud, or she made brief comments at certain points. In other words, she did what people do when they’re reading a book for pleasure. Those comments, brief and spontaneous though they were, provided lots of helpful information about how the work was coming through to her. Her other observation—that, if she didn’t know Puntitas personally, she would assume Puntitas to be a lesbian—went into the same mental compartment as the dissertation-as-bowel-impaction image.
After my friend had left, I thought more about the sonnet. It wasn’t the usual obsessive thinking that belongs to a work in progress, rather the indifferent consideration of someone who has no stake in the outcome. My friend was right about the ending. It includes an image that explains the speaker’s attitude, but the image doesn’t make sense because it can’t literally be true. I opened the file and began by tackling the misspelling. The changes came relatively quickly—all in the final sestet. The finished poem reads more like natural speech; the rhyme scheme is less slant; and the closing image works on a literal and poetic level. I think both the temporal and emotional distance were what made the revisions easy.
Puntitas reads _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.