The Piecework of Writing - Poetry

Literary Review, Spring, 2003 by Gary Fincke

The Piecework of Writing

--Eidetic is the term for mental images so clear and vivid
they are photographically sharp.

   Shorthand

   One evening, my mother wrote everything
   I said, smiling as my sentences sped
   Into a stutter of stupid phrases
   That spoke the idiot in me when she
   Read each one exactly back from shorthand.

   In her notebook was nothing but the curves
   And squiggles of crib-art, and when, angry,
   I speed-read each verse of the longest Psalm,
   She recited from those scribbles as if
   She were cued by the whispered voice of God.

   Writing Everything

   In the next county, the woman
   Who can't stop writing, her story
   On television, followed by
   The news of history's cases,
   Words, then sentences, paragraphs,
   Pages and pages and pages.

   For privacy, she says, she built
   A room. For storing her notebooks
   Like William Harvey, who dug
   Secret spaces under his house
   In which to think, discovering,
   Meanwhile, the functions of the heart
   And the circulation of blood.

   There, in those caves, when Harvey wrote,
   He spelled pig with three gs, tripled
   The last letters of hearttt and blooddd,
   Shorthand for his nonstop writing,
   Holding his breath with his pen hand
   To hear better, perhaps, his heart.

   The woman who claims she's writing
   The serial book of her life
   Brings a book to the camera.
   Months, she says, it's taken, to work
   A week into the long story
   Of the difficult act of art.

   "Look here," she murmurs, opening
   The volume, and the reporter
   Softly reads: "I began to write.
   I kept writing. The light changes.
   I write. I write. I write. I write,"
   Sounding out a pulse, the words
   Swirling, then reswirling, like blood.

   The Book of Numbers

   From one to one million, in pica type,
   Marva Drew recorded all the numbers
   On two thousand five hundred pages stacked
   Beside her typewriter like a novel.

   When I was seven, I reached ten thousand
   In a weekend, filling twenty pages
   Before I handed them to my mother.
   "No mistakes," she said. "Good job." And I thought,

   Ten thousand and one, ten thousand and two,
   And went outside to bounce a rubber ball
   Off the roof and a wall to simulate
   Seven tense baseball games in a season

   Of one hundred fifty four, keeping track
   Of runs and hits, the batting averages
   Of every player, updating success
   And loss, writing after every inning.

   Piecework

   When I told the old women to slow down,
   That I was fired of lugging pulled chicken
   By the hundred pound, every one of them
   Said "Fuck off" so fast, so uninflected,
   I knew I wasn't the first food-hauler
   Not to recognize the speed of piecework.
   That evening I was stealing my paycheck
   By the hour, as lazy as Forrest Ford
   Had called us, teaching the piecework credo.
   He'd meant plane geometry, the number
   Of proofs we completed, the quality
   Of our work. Those who counted for nothing,
   The failures, Forrest Ford dared with his fists.
   They needed the piecework of punishments,
   Or they'd hurt somebody besides themselves.
   We needed the forces of pride and shame,
   Our test grades, by name, posted on his door
   To say who we were in mathematics,
   Where discipline was measured, teaching us,
   He said, "How all are judged," nothing about
   The daily tests of sexual longing,
   Small expectancies for joy, those women
   Hurrying steamed chicken meat to the scale,
   The shadows of nearby houses running
   In from the late sun that chased those women
   Who scurried, by the clock, into darkness,
   Their voices issuing from their thick hands
   In the common language of usefulness
   Mastered, as always, by the rote of touch.

   The Five-Minute Diary of Robert Shields

   A man, once, recorded his life in a diary divided into five-minute
   intervals.
   He wrote for the piecework of words, so often and so long
   talking through
   his fingers, sleep was anxiety for the pages unwritten. He woke
   to the joy
   of "I rose and then reached for my pen." He worked the minutes
   into shape
   until twenty-four years had inched into eighty-one boxes full
   of five-minute diaries.
   When he brushed his teeth, he detailed it; while he shaved,
   he wrote. Everything he ate
   was recorded in the lines of the last few minutes.

   Some mornings Robert Shields made the resolution
   of conclusion: Write, he said
   to himself, This is the last line, and then he recorded the next
   secrets--breakfast, the shades
   of light in the kitchen, how many steps he took leaving and
   returning to the room where
   the diary offered itself like pornography. Until 11:20, settling into
   bed, pulling up blankets.
   Until 11:25, turning of f the lights, writing in the dark.
   Until 11:30, writing; still writing, still writing.

   Memorizing the Dead

   Traveling home, after death, with snapshots,
   I fail to match my memories to scenes,
   Learning the limits of photography,
   Nothing at all like the classmate who'd named,
   After the short funeral for our friend,
   Each of the forty-eight of us who'd died.

   Nothing at all like Marcella Gebert,
   Who ran the times tables to one hundred
   One afternoon at the end of fifth grade,

   Said thirty-four times seventy-six was
   Two thousand, five hundred and eighty four
   Though she'd failed a grade, though she couldn't read.

   Nothing at all like Cy Gillner, who sat
   Up front on the bus for eleven years,
   Remembering his textbooks word for word
   Until the CIA hired him to crack
   The Soviet Union's codes for fury.
   We went to the school for coincidence,

   Two savants in the neighborhood, nothing
   At all like probability's classroom.
   The last time I had seen my dead classmate
   Was eighteen years ago at another
   Reunion, but I stared at his body
   This afternoon until he reappeared.

   The Eidetic Champion

   Thomas Macaulay, I've read, memorized
   The whole of Paradise Lost overnight.
   So remarkable, and yet the current
   Eidetic champion resides in Burma,
   Reciting, so far, seventeen thousand
   Pages of Buddhist books. And who proofreads
   His recitation, listening for flaws?
   And who wants to memorize my notebooks,
   Two hundred of them to recite, twenty
   Thousand pages of poetry and prose?
   Who wants to read files of discarded work,
   The boxes of drafts with penciled changes?
   Marva Drew kept typing, hunched like a dog
   That digs a hole in a front yard, beaten
   And going back to start a new one, smacked
   And going back again. The friend who died
   Was fifty-five. After his funeral,
   I drove home to four hours and twelve minutes
   Of music. I heard seventy-two songs.
   I sang each of them to keep from counting.