How It Finally Ended

Gerald shouts
terrifically as
he sails downstream like
a young man with a
destination.

                                                                                                                               --James Tate, Success Comes To Cow Creek

   "You are the greatest writer ever!"  Nadia shouted as she waved a half sheet of paper on which I had written a prose poem for her. I had slipped it beneath her door a half hour earlier with a note scrawled on the back saying I was off for a walk in the country. She was out of breath when she caught up with me and only half sober with the sun still high in the evening sky. Thinking there might be some magic for us there, we lay down in the warm grass on the bank of a stream where a now famous poet had often come to write. "I meant it," she said afterward. "The greatest! Ever!"

   

   The Eskimo told Rasmussen that whenever they needed a new song, the words would "shoot up of themselves." Many would be the words that came over them, they said, "like the wings of birds out of darkness." Sadly, my own words, which heretofore had always come to me of their own, began to fail me. Without words, Nadia's love for me began to diminish. She said she hoped there would be some kind of recovery, but soon grew tired of waiting and eventually ran off to the west coast with a slogger of prize-winning doggerel. Finally, for lack of words I was forced to give up writing altogether. There was no recovery. And the poet doesn't come here anymore.

                                                                                                                glwarren, 2014