Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine poet laureate.

Not many poets would confess to the personal themes they’ve avoided in their work, or even quite know what they are. Yet in this brave poem which concludes his new collection, Death of a Ventriloquist, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc of Portland both reveals those themes to us and challenges himself with them.

The Nots

By Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

A writer is accountable also for what

he chooses not to write. – Edmond Jabés

I haven’t described the flight path of my shouts

at two toddlers in a car. I’ve said little

of my father, a dash. I’ve not been head

in hands, unable to stop my baby’s wails.

That wasn’t me, slack-jawed before a screen,

vacant as neon, forgetting my own name.

Not once have I forgotten my son

on his birthday or how to touch my wife.

That was someone else who tightened

your heart with a skate key. Confessed not

being the cherry atop a Manhattan,

nor a tiny umbrella crinkling over a daiquiri.

No tantrums on or off the page.

I told none of the stories I wished to.

They turned out to be tangles of nerve fibers

unjoined, two roads without a bridge between.

I’ve not spread my arms wide as they would

and said, Do with me what you will.

Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2012 Gibson Fay-LeBlanc. Reprinted from “Death of a Ventriloquist,” University of North Texas Press, by permission of Gibson Fay-LeBlanc. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 228-8263. “Take Heart: Poems from Maine,” an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.