We had just returned from a doctor’s appointment when I got the call telling me Veil and Burn was a winner of the National Poetry Series. At one moment my husband and I were drinking coffee at our yellow formica and chrome table, and a few minutes later this lovely person on the phone was telling me something I could barely believe.
The doctor’s visit had been fairly uneventful but oddly portentous. I had been reading Maxine Kumin‘s book Jack and Other Poems, and the doctor asked me about it when he came in. I told him she was a judge for a contest I’d finalized for but probably wouldn’t win, and how I’d been reading her for years. The doctor said that having the name Thomas Lux made for occasional requests to sign books of poetry, which, as I remember, he said he did once even though he is not the poet with that name. I could be wrong. It makes for a more interesting story, though. I do recall the exam room was a bit different than most by the magazine selection. Art in America featured prominently, and when Dr. Lux saw my husband reading it, he said, “That’s a good one . . . when was that, January?”
What interests me now as I write this is the idea of mistaken identity. My doctor mistaken for Tom Lux, me reading a book by the poet who selected my book on the day I was notified she had chosen my book back in June. And who was I now? It had been such a year of adjustment—and I’m not complaining, believe me—no longer a graduate student but a writer and poet, not knowing exactly which art I should choose for the moment, trying to put together a book of creative nonfiction I’m still feeling my way through today. The speakers in my poems and nonfiction are mere facets of myself refracted through different lenses. I could not definitively point to one of those panes to say this is who I am. So many of those identities are lost to me now, and some new ones have formed. No longer, at least for now, a horsewoman, no longer a student, no longer a Californian, I still claim them even though they’re beyond my reach. I hold my purse like I would hold a rein. I move up a bit and draw my heels in when the Olympic rider cues her horse over a jump. The poems take me back. I am convinced identity, coincidence or not, can simultaneously be both mistaken and true, and I, on the phone at that little table, the August light shafting through stained glass, can feel for a moment like the luckiest girl anywhere.
Laurie Clements Lambeth is the author of a new poetry collection, Veil and Burn. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.
