Fiction In A Poem

I observed a colleague's class yesterday. She was teaching a session of introductory short-fiction, and it was a splendid session. The class was discussing ways in which to end short stories, and apparently the textbook had suggested that one way to end was to evoke a sense of "infinity" quietly; the textbook used the example of a lone clarinet ending a symphony. Rather than accepting that analogy uncritically, my colleague went through her collection of symphonies by some of the Greats--and couldn't find an example of the lone clarinet! She played a few symphony-endings for the class, and this generated a great discussion of analogies between musical and fictional "endings," and about the implications of a happy ending, a tragic ending, a vague ending, a surprise ending (the "twist"), and so on. She was able to find a movement in a Berlioz symphony (Fantastique, I think) that ended with the sound of a lone horn.

Poets struggle with how to end poems, of course, but how to end stories may involve even more pressure. Poets are also often able to avoid the struggles of working with characters, who can become quite real (even thought they're just made of words), insistent, and stubborn, telling the author what to do (at least it feels this way sometimes), when the author thought he or she was in charge of writing the story. Sometimes, in my capacity as a fiction-writer, I have the urge to hit an unmanageable character over the head with a clarinet. I think I'd been working on a novel--many years ago--when I wrote the following poem, which concerns unruly fictional characters:

An Author Falls in Love With a Minor Character

I first noticed her in early scenes with
the hero. She was unremarkable,
there to get him
believably from point A to point B.
It was supposed to be geometry.

Now the hero’s been in a bar
in the fourth chapter for a year.
I might as well write the scene in which
an ambulance wails down a wet street,
pulls up to the bar. He’ll die there.

A telephone rings in the novel.
She walks across a room
to answer it. It’s me. I tell her
I’ve thrown it all over, all those
other lives, given up all plots for her.

I ignore how foolish I sound asking
“Where would you like your life
to take you? What kind of smile
shall I invent for you?” She says,
“Oh, you shouldn’t do all that for me.”

There’s something in her voice
I haven’t heard before. A certain
calculation. I consider the prospect
of following her
through my mind’s streets. I’m alarmed.

She says goodbye, replaces the receiver,
gently, crushes out a cigarette. I write,
“. . .crushes out a cigarette . . .” on the screen,
hate it. I’m unable to stop. I write only
to find out more about her.