Poem

by Rob Hardy

THE DISHWASHER HAD BEEN the first to go. No one would come to repair it, and there was no replacement available, so they began doing all of their washing up by hand, standing side by side at the kitchen sink. They talked quietly together and didn’t have to worry about forbidden words. 

The furnace died in December, but they still had enough firewood to last the winter. They closed off the rooms they never used and spent the winter sitting around the wood stove. His wife sat across the room from him, picking apart old sweaters and knitting them into new sweaters. There was no new yarn to be had and she needed to knit. But he had nothing like knitting to tide him through the winters. He used to write poetry, but these days poetry was impossible. The poet—we’ll call him that—lay awake at night, thinking about all the brokenness around him. 

For a while the clock still worked, but one morning he walked into the kitchen and found the hands frozen at twelve minutes past two. He dug an old wristwatch out of a drawer, strapped it onto his wrist, and headed for town to see if he could find a watch battery. 

It was a three-mile walk to town, past the half-built houses of the abandoned subdivision, past the fields full of junk, past the stand of trees with plastic bags caught in their branches, past the houses with high fences around their yards where he began to feel invisible eyes upon him, past street signs riddled with bullet holes, past the fenced-in and boarded up public library. The plywood boards over the windows were painted black, a torn and weather-bleached notice was plastered to the door. He hurried past. 

A bell jangled above the door as he entered the shop. An older woman was standing at the counter with her back to the door, taking eyeglasses from a box on the counter, trying them on and setting them aside. She turned and squinted at him as he entered the shop, then turned back to the box of eyeglasses. The shopkeeper stood behind the counter and nodded at him as he entered. 

‘Just be a minute,’ the shopkeeper said. 

What’s a minute? He looked at the watch on his wrist, at the motionless red second hand, at the twelve numbers, the sixty black dashes marking out the circle of the watch face. Time stood still. The woman picked through the box of eyeglasses.

‘These,’ she said, finally, holding out a pair of red wire-rimmed glasses.

‘What have you got for me?’ the shopkeeper asked. 

The woman glanced down at the gold wedding band on her hand. 

‘I have nothing to give you,’ she said. 

The poet unstrapped the watch from his wrist held it out to the shopkeeper.

‘Will you take this?’ 

‘A watch?’

‘It needs a battery,’ the poet said. ‘That’s what I came for. But you can have the watch for the glasses.’ 

The shopkeeper took the watch from the poet and handed the woman the eyeglasses. The woman put them on, focused a suspicious look at the poet, then averted her eyes and hurried out of the shop. The bell jangled above the door. 

*

There had been other poets, seven or eight of them who met twice a month at the public library. Then the notice had appeared on the door and the windows were boarded up, and the poet had lost touch with the others. 

It’s not that they hadn’t seen it coming, but it had appeared as such a small speck on their horizon that it felt safe to ignore it. They had seemed so far away from everything. Then the notices began to go up. The public library closed. And how quickly people became suspicious! How quickly they became guarded in their speech. Soon words began to disappear. The government announced an Index of Forbidden Words, but because the words were forbidden, it was also forbidden to publish the Index containing the forbidden words. No one knew which words were on the Index. As a result, people had stopped talking to each other or even going out in public where a conversation might happen and a forbidden word might slip out. 

That winter had been hard, but in March spring came warmer and earlier than ever. The creek had thawed and risen and settled back between its banks. Wildflowers bloomed along the banks, though fewer than he remembered, and there were fewer birds in the trees. The poet liked to stand beside the creek and listen to the sound of the water flowing over the rocks. 

In one of the cottonwoods there were six crows who occasionally rose and settled again in the branches, murmuring. He had grown suspicious of crows, how they seemed to listen and understand, how they suddenly flew off, cawing, as if to spread their secrets. He watched them for a few minutes, but they would not leave.

‘Sorrow,’ the poet said.

Sorrow was such a beautiful word, he thought. Anglo-Saxon. A word that belonged in an old poem. He wondered if the Index contained words that were forbidden just for the beauty of their sound. He wondered how the ban on words was enforced, if no one knew which words were banned. How could an informant inform on someone for using a banned word without using the word himself? To report to the authorities that ‘so-and-so said such-and-such’ requires the informant to say ‘such-and-such.’ 

He thought back on the brief conversation in the shop. Why had the woman looked at him so suspiciously? What had he said? Had he said a forbidden word?

‘Need,’ he said. 

The crows stirred themselves, taking their wild caws into the distance. A breeze moved through the slender branches of the willow. 

*

In one of the rooms they had closed for the winter, the room where he used to do his writing, the poet opened a drawer and found an unopened package of watch batteries. There were two of them. He put them into his pocket and told his wife he was walking into town. 

He hurried along until he came to the public library, where he suddenly stopped outside the high chainlink fence and looked up at the black plywood boards that covered the windows. On the board to the left of the entrance, someone had painted: 

Old pond

frog jumps in

plop!

The poet recognized the words of Bashō’s famous haiku. He had always loved that haiku, how it left ripples in his mind, how from just six words he could imagine an entire world. But how had it gotten there? Someone would have had to climb over the fence with paint and paintbrush and ladder without being caught. Who could have done such a thing? He realized he had been standing there too long and might be drawing attention to himself. He hurried on to the shop. 

There was no one else in the shop this time but the shopkeeper. 

‘I found two watch batteries,’ the poet said. ‘I’ll let you have one of them in exchange for my watch.’ 

‘Then I’ll have a watch battery but no watch,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘Give me both batteries and I’ll give you back the watch.’ 

‘That doesn’t do either of us any good,’ the poet said. 

He left the shop without the watch. As he passed the public library on the way home, he saw a crew of workers in gray uniforms painting over the haiku. The last word was all that remained visible. 

plop!

*

He returned the following day with an unopened package of dishwasher pellets, acquired just before the dishwasher died. As he walked past the public library, he noticed the razor wire strung along the top of the chainlink fence, and the lights installed at each corner. Uniformed men were patrolling the streets. 

In the shop he placed the package of dishwasher pellets on the counter. The shopkeeper shook his head. 

‘She came back,’ the shopkeeper said. ‘The woman with the glasses. Gave me her ring and told me to give you back the watch.’ 

‘Her ring? That’s too much.’

The shopkeeper shrugged. 

He remembered her now, the woman with the eyeglasses. She had been one of the librarians at the public library. She had been there on Wednesday nights when the poets met, had sat quietly behind the desk while they read their poetry, had always seemed impatient for them to leave so she could turn out the lights and lock up. 

The poet took the watch and strapped it onto his wrist. He left the dishwasher pellets on the counter. It wasn’t enough to redeem the woman’s ring, but he would be back. 

In the brief time he’d spent inside the shop, a new roadblock had been set up at the edge of town. The poet was stopped by a man in riot gear with a mask over his face. The man asked the poet for his identification.

‘What business did you have in town?’ the man asked. 

‘I came to redeem my watch at the shop,’ the poet said. 

‘Let me see.’

The poet unstrapped the watch and handed it to the man. 

‘It still needs a battery,’ the poet said. 

The man looked at the watch. 

‘Is all of this because of the poem?’ the poet asked.

‘Remain where you are,’ the man said. 

The man went over and consulted with another uniformed man who was standing on the other side of the street. The two men spoke quietly together, and one of them took out his phone and made a call, glancing down at the poet’s identification card as he spoke. Finally the first man came back across the road to where the poet was standing. 

‘You said one of the forbidden words,’ the man said. ‘It was just added to the Index. We’ve reported your name and identification number, but this time you’re allowed to go with a warning.’

The man handed back the poet’s watch and identification card. The poet opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing. 

*

When he got home, he told his wife what had happened. She was wearing the sweater she had knit that winter out of the yarn from the previous winter’s sweater. 

‘Poem?’ she said. 

‘Poem,’ he repeated. ‘That must have been the word.’ 

How long would it be until all the words were on the Index? How long until there is no more language and we are all completely silenced? He had been so careful, often avoiding speech altogether because he didn’t know what he could say. He had given them his silence freely, all these months when he had said nothing. 

The poet—can we still call him that? — went into the little room where he used to write his poems. He sat down at his desk and took the package of batteries out of the top drawer. He removed the watch from his wrist. With the point of one of the blades of his pocket knife, he pried open the back of the watch to insert the new battery. To his surprise, a small slip of paper fell out of the battery compartment. He unfolded the paper and smoothed it out on his desk. He read:

Old watch

new battery

time begins

He read it again, out loud this time. Then, for the first time in many months, he took out his pen and a clean sheet of paper and began to write. 

oOo

Rob Hardy served as the first Poet Laureate of Northfield, Minnesota, from 2016 to 2023. His most recent fiction was published in Emerald City.