My Poem Won Second Place in a Two-Person Contest
The certificate doesn't mention the field size, and neither do I.
The certificate came in an envelope stamped DO NOT BEND in red letters, which turned out to be less an instruction than a prophecy. I bent it getting it out. Then I read the words SECOND PLACE and stood in my kitchen making a sound I can only describe as a kettle discovering pride.
Second place.
In the Harlow County Autumn Verse Prize. Me.
You have to understand what this meant. I was thirty-four years old and I had been writing poems in secret since I was eleven, the way some people keep a flask in a desk drawer. I had never shown anyone anything.
The poem I entered was about a photograph of my grandmother at nineteen, standing in front of a fence in a dress she made herself, squinting into a sun that has been down for sixty years now. I keep the photo in my wallet even though wallets are terrible archives. The edges have gone soft as cloth.
I told everyone. That is the embarrassing part, or the first embarrassing part. I told my sister, who screamed. I told my dentist, mid-cleaning, with the little suction tube still in my mouth. I told a man at the bus stop who had asked me nothing except whether the 42 had come yet. Second place, I said, out of who knows how many entries. Hundreds, probably. Poetry is very competitive.
The award ceremony was held in the community room of the Harlow branch library, between the seed exchange shelf and a poster about tax help for seniors. I wore a blazer. I brought my sister, and a speech folded in my pocket, because you never know, maybe second place gets to say a few words.
There were nine chairs set up and eleven people, which I took as a good sign, standing room only... until Dorothy, the librarian running the event, a kind woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, stood up and thanked both of our entrants.
Both.
The word went through me like cold water through a sock. I did the math slowly... hoping it would come out different. Two entrants. Two prizes. First and second.
I had not so much placed in a contest as attended one.
My sister leaned over. "Both?" she whispered, and I could hear the laugh she was holding in her nose, the way she used to in church.
"Don't," I said.
The first place winner was an eighty-six-year-old man named Walter Brice, who wore a tie the color of weak tea and stood up with two canes to receive his certificate.
And here is where the story was supposed to be funny... and stopped being only funny, because then Dorothy asked him to read his poem, and he did.
It was about his wife's coat. Just her coat, still on the hook by the door, three years after her. He read it in a voice like a gravel road, and nobody in that room, all eleven of us, breathed. There is a line in it I still think about, about how a coat holds the shape of shoulders the way a bell holds the shape of a sound. When he finished, Dorothy took her glasses off. The man who ran the seed exchange wiped his eyes with a seed packet.
I lost to that. Thank God I lost to that.
Imagine beating that with a poem about a photograph. I would have had to move counties.
The certificate does not mention the field size, and I have decided that the certificate and I understand each other.
Afterward there were butter cookies and orange drink in paper cups, and I did the bravest thing I have ever done in a library, which is walk up to Walter Brice and tell him his poem broke me a little. He looked at me for a long moment and said, "Yours was about your grandmother." I said yes. He said, "The fence was good. You hid behind the fence, though. Next time write the part you left out."
I knew exactly what part he meant. I had left it out on purpose.
Here is what Walter saw through. My grandmother raised me for four years while my mother was, as the family put it, "resting," a word that did a great deal of lifting in our house. The poem mentioned none of that. It was all fence and sunlight and homemade dress. It was a poem written by someone standing at a respectful distance from his own life, waving politely.
Walter and I started meeting at the library on first Tuesdays. This was his idea, delivered as a fact rather than an invitation. He would bring poems typed on an actual typewriter, mistakes corrected in blue pen, and I would bring mine on printer paper, and we would trade them across the table like men exchanging letters at a border. He was ruthless. He once handed a poem back to me and said, "This poem is wearing a blazer." He was right. I write everything in a blazer.
He was also the one who made me start entering things again. Not local contests. Everything. He said losing was a skill and I was undertrained. So I sent poems out the way you are supposed to, into a monthly poetry contest where the field was reliably larger than two, and I lost... and lost... and lost with increasing skill. Somewhere in there I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and it said in three pages what Walter had said in one sentence with a butter cookie in his hand: the reader can always tell what you are protecting.
So I finally wrote it. The real version. The one with my mother in it. The version where the photograph in my wallet is soft at the edges because for four years it was the only picture of family I could stand to look at, and I looked at it the way other kids looked at television. I wrote about memory the way Walter wrote about the coat, from inside it, with the door closed and the hallway light still on.
That poem placed nowhere at all.
Twelve hundred entries... and it went down without a sound.
I called my sister to report the results, and she said, "So the polite poem about grandma got second out of two, and the true one got nothing out of twelve hundred?" and I said yes, and she said, "Poetry sounds like a scam," and I laughed until the phone got hot against my ear.
But here is the thing I could not explain to her over the phone. The second place certificate hangs in my hallway now, framed, still slightly bent, and every person who visits says congratulations, and I say thank you, and the field size stays between me, Walter, Dorothy, and the seed exchange man. The other poem, the losing one, the twelve-hundred-entry casualty, is the one I am proud of. Nobody printed me a certificate for it. It does not need one. It knows what it did.
Walter turned eighty-eight this spring. At our last first Tuesday he slid a new poem across the table, read mine twice in silence, tapped it once with a blue pen, and said the best thing he has ever said to me, four words I will be chasing for the rest of my writing life:
"No blazer. No fence."
Then he ate my butter cookie, because at his age, he says, dessert is a contest with one entrant, and he intends to take first.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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