I GUESS I OWE everything to the old moose head hanging over the front desk at the Beaver Lake Lodge in Wild Duck, Minnesota. It is a rather large obnoxious thing even for me and it usually needs dusting. The first time I visited the lodge I was just out of college likely trying to get over some girl. I went there to shoot some muskrat and maybe a deer or two. There was a fellow there for a few days that looked a lot like Jim Tate. The poet Jim Tate. I kept eying the guy, you know, wondering if it were him until he told me to keep my eyes to myself. So I didn’t figure out if it was Jim or not. At Wichita State, I had gone to a James Tate reading when he was just 25 years old, fresh from winning the Yale thing and he read that dead pilot poem. Jim was from Kansas and I was from Kansas, so I wondered if I could win that thing too. I’m not saying Jim’s poems were boring, only that they left room for someone else, maybe some average guy like me, to be a poet too. Now don’t get me wrong. I loved Rilke but sometimes Rilke didn’t allow that in his Thursday afternoon workshop. So anyways, I said to the proprietor, “That head sure needs dusting. I could do it for you for a complimentary night’s lodging.” I knew he wouldn’t give me a free night to dust his old moose head. It was just my way to advise the guy it needed it. Hey, you gotta ask. But damn, if the guy didn’t say, “Well, alright then, yeah. I got a ladder out back.” So while I was up there nearly breaking my fool neck, ol’ Jim (if it were Jim. I can’t say) came by and snickered. That’s all, he just snickered. Many years later, someone told me, “Hey you write a lot like James Tate. Ever hear of him?” “Well, yeah,” I say, “I used to read his dead father poem and tried to write a bit like that. That was then. It was the Sixties. Not now.” My friend says “No, it’s something else. Something newer, surreal even. Yup, you sound just like him.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. So I got a book of Jim Tate’s new poems. Memoir of the Hawk, it was called. And damn, if every poem in there didn’t sound to me like some hick muskrat hunter from Minnesota dusting a moose head at Beaver Lake Lodge and other stories out of my own head which any fool knows aren’t ever true. — PAUL DICKEY
Paul Dickey has appeared recently in Plume, The Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, I-70 Review, Plainsongs, failbetter.com, and Apple Valley Review. The Omaha, Nebraska, resident’s recent book of poetry volume was released in September, 2022 in Anti-Realism in Shadows and Suppertime. He has also released in the past year a volume of flash fiction by What My Characters Should Have Said as well as a poetry chapbook.