By Chris Greenhalgh

I bag a guest spot on The Late Show. After some chit-chat,
the host asks what poetry means. I say I can’t answer that.
The producer whispers in her ear, “Two minutes, max.”
I see myself on a monitor and start the story of the stapler
I found clearing out the contents of my parents’ home after
they died—the stapler I’d begged for as a child, imagining
some big precision-engineered gizmo with knobs and dials.
There it sat now in in a drawer, rusting under a ball of string,
next to a box of extra-long matches, the same gunmetal blue,
the head bearing the manufacturer’s name, with a ribbon
to hold the staples in place. They’d kept it all this time—
like love that has nowhere left to go. Or a past you long to
climb inside. The host asks if I have it still. “What matters,”
I say, “is the memory of the thing and not the thing itself,”
She leans forward, inviting intimacy. A two-shot. I add,
“It’s the small stuff that dismantles you and makes you cry.”
Her voice rising, she says, “Is that what you mean by poetry?”
“Even if you can’t see the sun you still recognize its shimmer.”
Straightaway the camera swings. The ear-phoned producer
levels a hand in a cutting motion to his throat. Stage crew
lift big signs saying, Applause. Spotlights rake the audience.
With brisk professional sincerity, but without a glance at me,
the host says, “Thank you,” then exhorts everyone to join her
after the break when she will be talking to a woman who
claims her gran in secret married one of the Fab Four.
Footage shows them bowing in unison at the end of a song.
Before I pass darkly into the things around me, I see on the
monitor my head enlarged as in a shaving mirror. Not a
moment I want to stay in. As I watch on the sofa back home
the simulacrum seems more real than myself. I wonder if,
impossibly, my parents were to see the broadcast, flung into
the ether beyond the star belt, what they’d make of it all.
Mum? Dad? I have a faint recollection mum preferred Paul.

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Chris Greenhalgh is the recipient of a Gregory Award for poetry in the UK. Since completing a doctorate on the poetry of Frank O’Hara, he has published three full volumes of poetry, two novels (translated into thirteen languages) and a screenplay for the film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which occupied the closing slot at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. He currently lives in Milan, Italy.