I won a street sign at a trapper auction. I hadn’t bid on the
sign. I bid on other things (a dozen snares, stretching boards,
Bunny Boots). The sign was a place-your-name-in-the-hat kind of
chance thing. But it wasn’t a hat in which I placed my name. I
wrote my name and phone number on the back of a ticket and
dropped the ticket in a fake brass container under the sign. The
sign was one of many items under which the same kind of
containers held many of the same kind of tickets, all with
different people’s information on them. An hour before the
scheduled end of the auction, someone chose a ticket from each
container and wrote the name of the item winner on a piece of
paper under each item. I walked out holding the sign, which I
took as a sign from God indicating that I should stop writing
poetry. It was a cold March night in Fairbanks when, walking out
of the hotel lobby almost too drunk to drive home, my life
suddenly seemed clear. Is this poetry, my friend? I don’t think
I’m asking. If so, understand I’ve tucked my son into bed after
having read him a book about worms, and I’m staring at the sign
hanging over my computer like one would hang a man and I’m
failing to describe how cold the air that night was in my throat
and how I’d swallow it once again if it meant I could exhale and
watch everything go up in smoke.
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