His wife says he's still a child.

Threatens to sell his

1968 Smith Corona Galaxie,

because he wakes the baby every night

with his clicking and clacking, DING!

If only she could see, the nine different

muses inside his head.

Tolstoy’s wife copied out seven drafts of

War and Peace: He would send her weekly telegrams

with edits. One word change

and she’d rewrite the entire page, by hand

with pen and ink. This apparently went on for years.

His literary agent suggests he find a hobby:

fishing, salsa, or perhaps take up the

violin.

He's convinced he's of the late bloomers,

the stalwart soldiers who never gave up

hope,

or did and despaired, but their writing

was better for it.

There was the summer he locked himself in

a room

for sixty days—inhaling coffee and cigarettes—

while his students systematically forgot

everything he’d taught

on allegory, conceit, and the Fate of the Prelapsarian

Man:

He was at his desk in a June fever,

striking the keys with white hot fear, matching the symphonic

mating cries of the cicadas in the trees

outside, and his words were sex

or money, or both.

(The trip they planned

but never went: a long weekend in Western Mass when the leaves turn

a red-gold crisp, by the pond where they first met

during her college years at Smith. They were young once,

and he had promised.)

Tomorrow, he’ll hear back about a story.

His story.

He’ll buy a bottle of champagne. The only sound

that will wake the baby, in the middle of the night,

will be the quiet shuffle of their two feet, as they slow dance in the kitchen,

she will draw close to him, in the fragmented moonlight, and

sigh.