Waxwing Slain
By Patrick Pearson
A waxwing fleeing from the sounding bells of a nearby chapel, flew past the window of a small stucco apartment, inside of which was a man sitting at his desk, snug against a radiator, having recently transcribed a line of Nabokov’s for its peculiar cadence.
I am the shadow of a waxwing slain.
Looking in the mirror on his desk he saw that he was now standing. He held his notebook in his hand and his pen in his teeth. He wondered how he got into this position where only moments ago he was sitting, transcribing. His shadow from the bronze desk lamp cast across the floor boards which made a dark faceless facsimile of himself. On the mirror’s pane was a small painted portrait pinned perpendicular above an ink bottle at whose foot dripped waxy, jet-black paint. Looking at the portrait, he thought how desperate he must have been to imagine himself becoming a successful painter. In the days when he painted seriously, he wrote verse better. It would have been more reasonable to imagine himself as a poet, though the ear of a seasoned critic should have recognised that his old poems shared a cadence with John Shade’s. “They Came Like Swallows” enjoyed enough acclaim after it was published to convince him he could make a living as a poet, though he knew pastiche was his pastime. S. J. Perelman said it was a prejudice to think that you should not imitate. Any aspiring painter or writer or poet copied, even if unintentional. His verse had periodically been published in periodicals, but those days were distant. He thought of Dickinson who said success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.
The bells in the background took a breath and the creeping silence threatened. He thought of Lispector who said that silence can be felt and if a deranged bird began to sing as if to break it, its faint flute would fail to offer relief. Had the passing waxwing chosen to perch upon the windowsill, it may have given Charles a brief respite from the death of noise. It may have even birthed that phantasmagoric sense when one reads a line into existence. The evening before, Charles read a passage from a book, his elbow pressed against the desk, his chin resting on the palm of his hand. The character was reading at their desk in the same position. It seemed to Charles in the moment that no other reader of that passage would have found themselves in the same position as he.
Had the waxwing perched
A verse would have searched
For Charles’ pen in his hand,
And his heart as he planned.
Bio: Patrick is a lawyer and writer living in Sydney, Australia. He is the owner of the instagram, Eleventh Volume, where he has written hundreds of book reviews since 2021. Patrick keeps a regular diary, ascribing to Dermot Healy’s view that fiction is voice and dialogue saturated with the wisdom that comes from observation and years of paying attention and writing things down. Patrick can be found on instagram at https://www.instagram.com/eleventhvolume/, on X (formerly known as Twitter) at https://x.com/EleventhVolume, and on substack at https://eleventhvolume.substack.com/ where he has interviewed readers and authors about the books that made them who they are.
Author’s Notes:
This piece of micro-fiction was inspired by the opening lines of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, written by the fictional character, John Shade. The piece explores the crippling circumstances of writer’s block and the author’s quest to find content in a saturated digital age. Charles unsuccessfully attempts to draw inspiration from his favourite writers (Nabokov, Lispector, Perelman, Dickinson) and even names one of his early poems after William Maxwell’s novel, “They Came Like Swallows”, which in turn, Maxwell took from Yeats’ beautiful poem, “Coole Park, 1929”. The reader may have recognised that the second-half of that line foreshadows, early in Charles’ career, the fading away of his success to find material to write about (They came like swallows and like swallows went). The astute reader may also recognise the relation of this line with the sudden disappearance of the waxwing.
It must be mentioned that the omniscient narrator in Waxwing Slain is astutely aware of Charles’ struggle to write but is emboldened by Charles’ revelatory reading experience in the final passage before the closing poem. It is the narrator that interposes and writes a poem that encapsulates the essence of Charles’ struggle. It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to interpret the narrator’s interposing poem as a personal gift to Charles, as its content is directly from his experience that evening in his room. Charles may or may not use this poem in furthering his poetic career but the narrator is telling Charles that his entire life experience – whether successful or not – is already at his disposal and if tapped into, can be used for the rest of his life.
