On Leaving America - Part 7

Desks:

 

This is the first and only real desk I have ever owned. It’s solid oak and heavy. Lasted 30 years— still good as new. Too big and bulky for the new place – maybe. Almost an antique. Desks are more clever now. They go around corners, wood and glass and chrome. Not sure I want to sell mine, or if anyone would buy. My wife’s been using it for these last 13 years. She has another at her office. My own working space upstairs has been two doors. They give a lot of flat space. That’s what I need. I tend to jump around a lot, three stories at a time and poems now and then. I’ve had good luck with poems. This last 12 months I’ve published twenty in the U.S.A. Brazil and India and England. Total income from all this — $1.00 from a publication I assume wanted to have some kind of legal rights. But that’s poetry. You don’t expect to make money.

The poems and fiction are in various states of progress and revision. Small mountains of paper that require flat space. I have four two door file cabinets in two rooms, each full. I need to sort through those as well. There must be some stuff I can throw away . . . or not. So much is filed that I’ve forgotten what I filed or where I filed it. This why I keep my works in progress in plain sight. In time they morph into a snowfall of white paper—what normal people would call a mess as you can see below. Some works have been ‘in-progress’ years.

Believe it or not I more or less know where things are. The novels, photos I need to scan, a lot of notes, revisions that I’m not sure read better than what they’ve revised, and more revisions to revisions that might work. I’ve kept both pre and post and in between. There are ideas, articles and clippings that relate. The room has looked like this for years and now I’ve got to clean it up, get organized, a Herculean task. I can’t imagine how to start to sort through all of this and organize. There are more books as well. All this will go to Sweden where the bedroom that will be my office space is to small for doors. My wife suggests one of those spiffy high tech corner desks—IKEA. I don’t know. Makes  sense I guess, but there would be less flat space. Maybe I should ship the big old desk. It’s smaller than a door.

Hard to let go of things.