Two Poems (April 24, 2009. New Moon. Issue 4)
Will It Be On The Test
I winced, we all did. Conner as usual was a jerk.
The girl next to me called him insensitive and stupid.
Back then insensitive was a girlie word to us high school boys,
but we all knew stupid.
Mr Drix had been droning on about transcendental numbers,
something about the log of e to an infinite power,
an exponent, a function, an equality none of us really understood.
Then Drix digressed. His eyes drifted from blackboard to sunlit window.
Our teacher went on—
Okinawa, WWII, 19 year old marine,
that rifle shot, that other one falling, probably also 19,
that nip, gook, Jap, (those were my teacher’s words)
how he spit blood, how he called out in incomprehensible Japanese,
how he grabbed his bleeding belly, how he shook—
how Mr Drix squeezed the trigger again.
And then our teacher asked—himself—all of us,
why that second shot? why that first one? was it right? was it wrong? yes? no? true? false?
There was no maybe, no sometimes, no answer in between
for the equation simplifies to either life or death.
Then he was silent, then all of us were, dead silent.
Then Conner blabbered his crucial question
for it all comes down to pass or fail.
And one needn’t really comprehend transcendental.
As for any question that can be only answered true or false, right or wrong,
I’ve had a lifetime of such tests and failed a little more than fifty percent.
Filling In Last Clues
The last puzzle was unfinished.
Usually it was all done in an hour, neatly and in ink.
Couldn’t finish high school, needed to earn money, tried prize fighting,
was a cloth cutter, saved, started a business, went bankrupt,
drove a cab, started a new business, eked out a profit,
and supported my mother, my sister and me.
He was called Sol, short for Solomon, the indeed wise.
Even in the locker room before a fight he’d consult a dictionary
to learn yet another new word.
My sister and I would giggle,
whenever we’d hear him reciting funny-sounding words
from a big book called Shakespeare’s Collected Works.
He’d always do the New York Times Sunday crossword,
a kind of weekly devotion, a Sabbath of erudition.
But he left the last puzzle unfinished.
I filled in those remaining boxes but with a pencil,
took me an entire day, made many messy erasures.
But I wasn’t finished.
One final clue needed solving.
Under the ACROSS column I added this clue—
Solomon was a . . ..
And under the puzzle boxes I drew more boxes
and filled in the answer:
S-C-H-O-L-A-R. |