Wendy Barker, "I Hate Telling People I Teach English"

Like last August, after they’d finished my bone scan,
this combed-over midsixties guy starts chatting about the novel
he’s written in his head, he only needs someone like me
to work it up, he never liked punctuation, parts of speech, all that junk
from junior high, and I couldn’t get my printout fast enough
to take to my GP, who likes to quote from his inspirational speeches
to local luncheon clubs. He’s determined to collect them
in a book, though he’d need a good editor, do I know any, and meanwhile
I’ve been waiting fifty-seven minutes for help with recharging
my sluggish thyroid, and I haven’t met any doctors who like giving
free advice about your daughter’s milk allergy or your friend’s
migraines or the thumb you slammed in the stairwell door, splitting it
open so badly your students interrupted your lecture on
pronoun agreement to note you were dripping blood from your hand
and wow, what happened? But it’s mostly at parties I hate
admitting I teach English. I’ve never been quick enough to fudge,
the way a Methodist minister friend says he’s in “support
services” so he doesn’t get called to lead grace. I guess I could dub myself
a “communications facilitator,” but since I’m in the business
of trying to obviate obfuscation, I own up, though I dread what I know is coming:
Oh, they say, I hated English, all that grammar,
you won’t like the way I talk, you’ll be correcting me, and suddenly
they need another Bud or Merlot or they’ve got to check out
the meatballs or guacamole over on the table and I’m left facing
blank space, no one who can even think about correcting
my dangling participles. Once when the computer guy was at the house,
bent over my laptop trying to get us back online,
he asked what it was I wrote, and when I told him “poetry,” said, “Ah-
fluffy stuff,” and I wasn’t sure whether he was kidding
or not, but I figured at least it was better than his saying he hated poetry
or that he had a manuscript right outside in his Camry and
could I take a look, no hurry, but he knew it would sell, could I tell him
how to get an agent for his novel about his uncle
moving to Arizona and running a thriving ostrich farm until the day
hot air balloons took off a half mile away
and stampeded the birds, till all he was left with were feathers and bloody,
tangled necks on fence posts, the dream of making two million
from those birds a haunting sentence fragment—but then, I think:
I would never have wanted to miss the time a dentist,
tapping my molars, asked if I’d like to hear him recite Chaucer’s Prologue
to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, which he did
while I lay back in his chair, open-mouthed, pierced to the root.

Wendy Barker

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