Poem-A-Day: David Lehman, Postscript

	August 30, 2012 Today's poem is copyright © 2012 by David Lehman. Used with permission of the author. More from this author Other Lehman Poems A Little History A Quick One Before I Go Autumn Evening French Movie Operation Memory You can unsubscribe from our Poem-A-Day emails at at anytime—either completely, or until next April. Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane Suite 901 New York, NY 10038 212-274-0343 academy@poets.org		Postscript by David Lehman He wrote the whole novel in his head, Sentence by sentence. It took him all day. Then he took out a wide-ruled yellow legal pad With three pink vertical lines marking the left margin, And from his breast pocket he extracted A disposable plastic fountain pen, And near the top of the page he wrote the word ODE In black ink, all caps. For a few minutes he did nothing. Then he skipped three lines and wrote, "It was the greatest birthday present he had ever received: The manual Smith-Corona typewriter His parents gave him on the day he graduated from high school After they took him to the Statler Hilton for lunch, Where they had cold poached salmon, his father's favorite." Share Digg StumbleUpon Facebook E-mail to Friend