A Moveable Famine by John Skoyles

responsibility in life and art. And on that day when he walked into the chatter and laughter of the seminar room, Monique shushed us and we all fell silent, as in a court of law. Lawson took the head of the table and placed a legal pad in front of him. He called the roll, nodding to those he knew, squinting at the rest. Then he lifted a yellow pencil, and held it vertically in front of us, saying nothing. We focused on that simple object for several seconds, all of us fixed on it, expectant, nearly hypnotized. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a cylinder with a cone attached. A pencil.”
    The room’s taut silence, the almost brittle, glass-like atmosphere was shattered by McPeak, who yelled, “Not so fast! Not so fast!” A few laughed, but most were frozen in the tension. Lawson continued, saying that one end was more important than the other—the end with the eraser. He said it was something he expected us to learn, adding, “Including you, Mr. McPeak.”
    The first poem was in syllabics and McPeak asked Lawson in a challenging way about the form. Lawson talked passionately about Yvor Winters telling Thom Gunn to write in seven syllable lines. He invited McPeak to stop by and borrow a collection of essays by Winters and a book by Gunn. A few days later, when McPeak went to the office, Lawson had forgotten his offer. He found Gunn but couldn’t locate Winters and said, “I guess I have to give you something.” He lent him an anthology of imagist poems that McPeak said was lousy, but what annoyed McPeak most was the way Lawson answered his door. “He just said Come. Just Come. Like I was a dog.”
    I told him it was probably habit, nothing personal.
    “Talk about being stingy with syllables!” McPeak said. “Would it kill him to add in ?”
    Lawson left the Winters book in McPeak’s mailbox the next week and to my surprise McPeak loved it, talking constantly about poetic convention and morality. He also never returned it. He began to change toward Lawson, saying, “There’s something to be learned from the man.” He sat at Lawson’s right hand, paying full attention, unlike his other classes where he leafed through Downbeat.
    One winter afternoon, the power went out in EPB and our classroom was freezing. Lawson seemed particularly cold and his hands shook as he shuffled his papers and expressed his aggravation at the building manager. We sat bundled in coats and hats reading by the sunlit windows. McPeak, who had driven from Illinois, drank coffee from the red lid of a towering plaid thermos. The steam crept toward Lawson’s chin and he glanced over at it several times, which McPeak noticed.
    “Would you like some hot coffee, Mitch?”
    The offer seemed almost maternal—it was the word hot , the way a mother would offer specific comfort and also show her importance. Lawson smiled. “That would be very nice,” he said, shifting in his icy seat.
    McPeak went to the dark lounge and returned with a cup. Lawson leaned away from the table as McPeak unscrewed the cap and poured. A spiral of brown liquid snaked toward the Styrofoam and all eyes watched McPeak as he held the thermos vertically in front of our teacher to coax out the coffee but managing only an inch.
    “I thought there was more in it,” he said. “I couldn’t tell. It’s heavy even when it’s empty.” He whirled it around in a futile spiral.
    Lawson seemed angrier at the half ounce of coffee than at the failed power.
    “That’s the problem with this,” McPeak said, continuing to shake the thermos as if motion could refill it.
    Lawson looked at McPeak and said what sounded like, “Thank.”
    Minutes later he canceled class and said he’d be in his office if anyone wanted to meet him, but no one dared. I walked downtown with McPeak who berated himself as he slapped the thermos against his thigh. He blamed Lawson for not having his own coffee. He blamed his wife for possibly having helped herself to his thermos that morning. He