Set Right by the Strangeness of Poetry—Andrew Calis

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by Andrew Calis

Recently, my daughter Lily knocked on the door of the bathroom where I was showering. She came with a gift, a poem she had written while lying in bed trying to fall asleep. It had been a particularly challenging day for me: professionally, I had had some difficult meetings; worse, the meetings caused me to be late picking up my kids from school; and when I got home, I managed to jam the garbage disposal with a hunk of metal that broke off the handle of a skillet I had been inordinately attached to. (It was part of a kitchen set, a rare gift my unsentimental dad bought me when I left home for college.) In my efforts to dislodge the broken metal, I accidentally dislodged the entire kitchen sink basin, which sank into the cabinet beneath it, gently leaking water from a pipe that I would now have to find a way to fix—at almost 9 pm on a weeknight.

Lily somehow understood I had had a rough day. Or maybe she, sensitive observer that she is, had heard my loud frustration in the kitchen, extrapolated that I needed some time and space while I tinkered and banged and prayed to St. Joseph the Worker to intercede for me. And when I had tinkered enough for the sink to be half-stable, resting on a stack of Norton Anthologies of Literature I had gotten in college, she found me and through a closed door read me her poem written on a sticky note—a prose poem that I break into lines below:

When your body 
is locked on land
with no hope, remember
that your heart has wings
that fly above your mind,
that soar above the earth. 
You have a choice.
You could keep it
locked up or
you could let it free.
You have wings.
Why not use them?