"Basement" by Louis Jenkins

We can laugh at this poem yet--yet being an almost hidden but quite crucial w0rd because for now, at least, the poem is funny, not because it's a joke but because it isn't. It's us. And that's okay. Yet.  

Appeared yesterday on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, a little bit of daily poetry--April is National Poetry Month (no foolin'). So I may just roll a couple out once in a while.

Just exactly what makes this a poem is beyond me. It doesn't rhyme, but then neither did T. S. Eliot. It doesn't have any consistent rhythm--you can't scan it or call it "iambic pentameter" or something profound. It's not even all that concentrated. It reads like a joke, a long one maybe; if there's any reasoning involved in determining line length, I don't what that reasoning is.

But it's fun, and besides, if we call it a poem we can once more wear that once-coveted title of "English major." So here 'tis, "Basement," by Louis Jenkins, who was born in Oklahoma but lived most of his life in Duluth, Minnesota, a master of what we might well call "the prose poem." And, we may as well say it, he was an old buddy of Garrison Keillor. Died in 2019.

Whatever you call "Basement," it's a little gem. And, it's our story.

BASEMENT
by Louis Jenkins

There’s something about our basement that causes forgetting. I go down for something, say a roll of
paper towels, which we keep in a big box down there,
and as soon as I get to the bottom of the stairs I have forgotten what I came down there for. It happens to
my wife as well. So recently we have taken to working
in tandem like spelunkers. One of us stands at the
top of the stairs while the other descends. When the descendant has reached the bottom stair, the person
at the top calls out, “Light bulbs, 60 watt.” This
usually works unless the one in the basement lingers
too long. I blame this memory loss on all the stuff in
the basement. Too much baggage: 10 shades of blue
paint, because we could not get the right color, extra dishes, bicycles, the washer and dryer, a cider press, a piano, jars of screws, nails and bolts…. It boggles the mind. My wife blames it on radon.