FICTION     

"Bill can’t resist leading Diane down Home Depot’s vast cement aisles
so she’ll get a sense of wood."

​                                   Photo by Weebly.com                                    

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A Poem, A Desk
by  Jackie Davis Martin

​Diane’s husband Bill is going to make a desk. He needs a desk to write poems. He’s written a couple of poems that she knows about, somewhere else, not at a desk, maybe with a pad of paper propped on his lap while he sits in his chair, and they’re pretty decent, but the desk would help him to concentrate fully on making poems. So he needs to make a desk.

These are simple matters, really: a poem, a desk. Maybe in reverse order. But they require a great deal of thought and discussion. Bill wants to discuss with Diane his vision of the desk he will make. He visits stores, runs his hand along the wood, judges the height of the working area, whether his knees will fit under the table part when he is sitting at the desk. These visits to antique stores and boutique furniture stores are trial runs by Bill before he returns with Diane so she can get a feel for the sort of desk he likes, the scope of the desk he can make.

Bill hasn’t built anything in the twenty-five years Diane has known him. So, in a sense, the desk is a warm-up of his old craft, one he says he performed early in his life before Diane, when he made beds and a sofa and chairs and tables for his family. Diane pictures the young Bill outside the farmhouse he’d purchased in New Hampshire, swinging an ax or sawing boards; she pictures the rustic interiors, the hemp cushions his then-wife arranged on the wooden frames of the furniture Bill made, his children, now middle-aged men, running their trucks into the solid wooden legs of the end tables.

Bill can’t resist leading Diane down Home Depot’s vast cement aisles so she’ll get a sense of wood. He points out to her the difference in qualities of wood, the air thickly redolent with it. What does she think of this grain? That grain? Both would make good desks.

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Bill is a man to overcome obstacles. The present obstacles he faces in his desk-making are several. One is the floor space to put the desk. They live in a flat that already has two desks. One desk, where Diane writes her stories, has been claimed as her own because she retired from full-time work first and conceded to a cheap IKEA thing which Bill put together for her—she’d forgotten this!—so he had, essentially, made a desk. The other desk is a relic from the past (hers) that sits in their bedroom piled high with files and bills and opera brochures, the bill-paying desk. But it’s too cluttered, so Bill writes bills at the dining room table. Clearly poems cannot be written at either desk, and the goal here is, ultimately, not to make a desk, but to make the poems that will emerge once the desk is in place.

So: Diane makes a brief tour of their flat to explore its new-desk possibilities. A nook in the kitchen? A corner of the dining room? Then she asks—surely he’s seen this obstacle—where will he build the desk? They have no garage, they live upstairs. Bill isn’t sure; he’s been considering, he’ll think of something. He’ll need tools, too, he says, to let her know he’s thought of angles she hasn’t.

Making plans to make the desk does not occupy Bill full time; the rest of the time he makes plans to make the poems. He reads poem after poem; the table next to his chair is piled high with books of poems. Volumes of poetry have filled one bookshelf, then another. Bill also wants to make bookshelves, maybe at a later date.
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Just today Bill pointed out another sort of desk that will work for him. It’s a drafting table, the flat area the size of a refrigerator turned on its side, the legs thick steel. Bill says he might be willing to forego the making part to acquire such a desk. Diane asks where they would put it. Well, he says, he just wants her to see some of what he has in mind. She can tell he thinks she is squelching his plans. Maybe he won’t show her his poems. ​

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​​Jackie Davis Martin’s stories have been published in anthologies, including Modern Shorts, Love on the Road, and Road Stories, as well as in print and online journals; A memoir, Surviving Susan, was released in 2012 and her novel, Stopgaps, came out in May of 2021.  She recently completed a new memoir. Martin has been a teacher all of her adult life, most recently at City College of San Francisco and at OLLI. When she is not writing or teaching, Martin has enjoyed, along with her late husband, Bruce, full seasons of San Francisco’s Opera, its Ballet, and its Symphony as well as performances at many of Bay Area’s many theatres.

Editor's Note:  Jackie Davis Martin is a first-time contributor to Vistas & Byways.

Other works in this issue:
Fiction:
​Soup
Little Bins

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