When the demerit cards we carried
in our wallets showed a line
of five black marks, just as
the immortal soul was defaced
by crimes venial and mortal--
long hair, tie forgotten,
animal sounds by which we showed
how close to beast a boy can be,
frog legs hanging from urinal,
as if like us the creature struggled
to emerge into evolutionary light
of bell, book, and candle,
or the quick furtive punch
to the groin of the one
just called to blackboard math--
we had detention on Saturday.
This meant a bus and train
and the reproachful dolor
of a mother paying dearly to have me
reach above my class.
We called this shame Jug--
no one knew why. Latin Scientific,
my course of study: Caesar, Virgil,
a virgin goddess, Ignatius, Xavier,
Madame Curie, Watson, and Crick.
Some of us had hopes of medicine--
many of the Irish kids, prosecutor
and then judge--but most were pointed
toward the business world which
we'd want to conquer for Him,
saving our suburban souls
by investment, diversified portfolio,
wise tithe. The punishment was poetry,
poems to be memorized without error
before a body could leave.
When the frost is on the pumpkin
and the fodder's in the shock,
I'd recite again and again
to myself as hours passed, knowing
the attempt aloud to Prefect
would be heard by the roomful
of snickering, snorting miscreants.
How easily word could get out,
a man condemned to high school hell
for reciting poorly, or too well.
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
and A wind blew out of a cloud,
chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee.
Feet of muddy trotter plodded
across the page, pulling me
in the sulky of adolescence.
Hoary verse, but still a new language
too human for me to be content
with all the other ways to say.
Later, as I waited by the tracks
for the Rapid Transit to rumble
the future to me, the poems
waited too, and have remained,
not penance, but a way to labor
this life. By word and song
we say our failing, cry our pride,
fields we've left fallow or crops
gotten in before the frost,
timbers of Old Ironsides gory red
or lapped by harbor tides,
youth's beauty pale and dying
on the bed beside the desk,
lines we work to know by heart
and measure out the distance of a life.