CONTRIBUTORS NOTES

***** *********** has recently returned to ****** having taught English in ********** for a year. A teacher by profession, he was recently published in *** ****** ******* and is completing a first collection.

I was driving in ****** one night, in a neighborhood I no longer knew well, when I remembered my old friend ***** *********** who had recently returned to live there. He had been teaching English for a year in *** ******* and although I had not seen him for many years prior to his departure for *** ******* I felt a strange compulsion to look him up now. Perhaps it was because I had read a poem of his published in *** ****** ******* the previous week. This poem, titled ***** ****, ******** ****, had touched me strangely. It was about his time in *** *******, the dismal landscape, his loneliness, his spiritless efforts to establish a significance in the links between his own country and the disenfranchised nation in which he found himself. The poem was largely about home, as is often the case with poems of all kinds not least those written by the displaced. It clearly delineated the spartan and degraded nature of the home he made for himself there, fired only by imaginative connections with what he knew to be home in ******. I resolved to see what sort of a home he had made for himself now on his return from the alienated place made beloved by poetry. I knew where he was living, or at least the name of the apartment block, because he had written to me not long before asking for a recommendation for a teaching job for which he was applying. He was a teacher by profession and wrote poems, I suppose, in an effort to continue the pedagogical relationship by constructing imaginary classrooms, imaginary sleepy heads, imaginary audiences to call to account, imaginary lives throbbing close to and outstripping his, during the long summer months. Time lies heavy on all our hands, even mine, as proved by this aimless driving I engaged in round about dusk on the relentlessly lengthening evenings. Having an address in mind made my driving immediately more purposeful. I nudged the car away from the overflowing sidewalks from which the young and shiny seemed literally to be toppling, balancing flutes of champagne. *****, I knew, would not be found there, among the partying bankers and program managers, Friday night though it was. He was completing a first collection and when I pulled into the parking lot of the immensely tall apartment block among whose tiers I knew he lived, I cursed myself for not remembering his apartment number. I scanned the windows and quickly eliminated those which were dark or decorated or shuddering with tv. Being methodical, I worked my way row by row through the remaining windows, from left to right. On the eleventh floor, second last on the right, I came to a window fully-lit and filled with the silhouette of a man, surely a man, hunched over a keyboard, the green light of the monitor conferring a sanctity to the scene, in a secular way, by which I suppose I mean he looked professional, ultra-professional, concentrated, special, privileged, lost, and extremely private and somehow whole. I resolved to go up and visit him. There was a moment outside his door on the eleventh floor when I felt somewhat foolish, wondering how I would explain my impromptu visit. After all, we had not met for many years and, truth to tell, had never been especially close. We were young together in the same place. I decided I would say that I had read his poem, that it prompted me to look him up, to see how he was settling in. Maybe I might even say that I was an editor now, that we were always interested in new and promising work. For a time I thought I would be spared the trouble of an explanation as no-one came to the door. Then it opened and there he was, my old friend *****, tousle-headed and weary, looking as if he had neither slept nor eaten for a number of days. Contrary to expectation, he did not seem at all surprised to see me and addressed me quite cordially by name, inviting me inside. This was what I wanted of course and I quickly took everything in: the postcard of *** ****** tacked carelessly on the wall, the futon thrown on the floor, the computer at the window, the fluorescent lights. He offered me coffee, tea, a drink-some cheap sherry, which he had already started-which I accepted. We talked about *** ******, where I had never been of course. I said how the poem conveyed so much of the place. He said how he is reminded of it everywhere now he is home. Sometimes reminders are not enough. He goes to the language schools in town and hangs about outside hoping to hear phrases of a language he never understood. It pulls at him now. He was unsuccessful in the job application for which I wrote the reference. He was hopeful about a position in a language school. He was thinking of going back, or if not there, somewhere else. Meanwhile he was completing (indicating the now dark computer) a first collection. He was writing a poem right now in which all the metaphors were reversed. That poem I read ***** ****, ******** ***- he was now writing another ******** ****, *****, exactly the same as the first but with all the metaphors reversed. It was about ****** rather than *** *******. Just as he once described *** *******, he could now only describe ****** in terms of *** ******. He was amazed that the poem he thought was about *** *******, and missing ******, could just as well be about ******, and missing *** ******. It was just a matter of changing a few words, transplanting local color. He would send it to ****, a girl he now discovered he loved. The alien things which he described in the poem I read in terms of things long familiar now helped me describe the familiar things. The thing that had been familiar was now strange; the strange had become familiar. You are an editor now, he said. He wasn't sure if we published poetry. He was thinking of translating his own poems.