Walking Down This Hall
I wish you would give me one good reason for walking down this hall.
Like there’re fish at the end of it and they want to know what your name is.
Or there’s a balloon just before you get to the end of it.
And it wants to know if you brought a pin.
Of course, I could go on like this, if I wanted to, listing these reasons.
And it would be a rather simple thing to do for the most part.
But I’m starting to get a cramp in my leg.
And mother always said, “Don’t blame me if you get a cramp in your leg.
Blame the people who brought you.”
And I’ve always thought that that’s a cogent bit of advice,
even if I never really went out of my way to advertise it
in places where it might have done some lasting good.
Because I like to think that everything I do in my life has some lasting good to it.
Like walking down this hall.
And asking you if you have any idea at all what will become of it
once they reclaim the house that it’s in.
And the banner we placed near its door.
| Lee Stern |
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levelheaded: Walking Down This Hall
“Walking Down This Hall” is all thumbs. It drags its feet. Where the speaker could have said, “they want to know your name,” he instead says “they want to know what your name is.” Where the speaker could have said, “it would be rather simple,” he says, “it would be a rather simple thing to do for the most part.” To comic effect, the poem sends an avalanche of “like” and “of” and “but” and “and” down the page. Individually these moments would seem clumsy or incompetent, but in Lee Stern’s poem, they coalesce into a cleverly conceived and emotional voice—one that’s entire business is to postpone moving out.
Speaking generally, much poetry seems quick to address the limits of language, while it is less willing to address the uses of language. One of these uses is to hold the rough, dangerous edges of the world from doing us real physical or emotional harm, to occupy our time with words and phrases instead of screams and helpless wailing. When the speaker in this poem trips over himself, he is doing everything he can to stay in his house a little bit longer. He isn’t using language to communicate a moment of intellectual profundity; instead, he is manipulating time. The cramp in the poem’s third stanza is like a cramp a child might get near the end of soccer practice. Whether it is real or not, the speaker gets to stop moving for a second. He gets to catch his breath and gather his nerves before finally moving forward, or in this case, moving out. Even the list the speaker begins to compose at the start of the poem is a method of postponement, but when he realizes that this “rather simple thing” always ends with him “walking down this hall,” he moves on to his next digression.
“Walking Down This Hall” is a poem of an instant. Poems that directly address current events seem either less common or more commonly overlooked these days, and perhaps it’s best we don’t get the news from poems (to paraphrase William Carlos Williams), but it is hard to separate Lee Stern’s poem from the uncountable reports of national economic crises, ballooning foreclosure rates, and bursting credit bubbles. Stern’s poem is a good example of the particular approach that poetry can make toward sensitive events. When there are enough angrily written op-ed pieces or short-lived exposés, it is nice to know there are well-conceived, well-executed attempts to present an emotional reality, one that helps us remember there are always people.
– The Editors
