we polish off
our stories
This was my contribution to the 2024 Haiku Society of America Members’ Anthology, “Hauling Tides.”
I wrote this haiku several years ago during the National Haiku Writing Month Challenge (NaHaiWriMo) that happens each February. You are given a writing prompt each day and you're challenged to write a haiku, the shortest form of poetry, each day of the shortest month.
The prompt for this particular day was “pilsner glasses.” This was a stretch for me. I'm not a beer drinker so I had to ask my husband what a pilsner glass looks like. What kind of haiku can I write about a beer glass, having hardly any experiences with beer glasses?? I was entering into the territory of writing a “desk haiku,” a haiku written from an idea rather than a direct experience. Some people frown on this because it bypasses the “haiku moment” in which a poet has a sort of moment of enlightenment and then captures it in words.
All those years of watching Cheers, however, and hearing the theme song over and over again came to my rescue. I imagined going to a place where “everybody knows your name,” and how it becomes a community where stories are told and in the telling, while Sam the bartender polishes glasses and listens, the people themselves are being polished because they are being listened to and heard and connections are being made. So that's where this haiku came from.
And, as it happens, this desk haiku turned into a lived experience when, a few years later, our neighbors opened the Wooly Pig Farm Brewery and my husband Kevin took a job in their tap room. Our son Gabe is also on the payroll as their groundskeeper and son Michael works in the tap room whenever he's back in Ohio for an extended time. Kevin doesn't stand around polishing glasses (does any barkeep actually do that in real life?) but he does listen to plenty of stories and make plenty of connections. And he does remember almost everybody's names.
