viernes, 9 de junio de 2017

Retirement day (an abridged biography of a highly qualified English teacher)

He gives his dick a shake and waits for one more drop before
He holds the wall with his left. A highly qualified English teacher
He has the only private bathroom in the High School.
To his left a small window, a breach of light, a crack
Amongst the hovering oaks. And beyond, he knows so well,
The football field, the tumultuous, body slamming, the grass,
The weaning chants and the false black wolf posted to scare off
the flocks of Canadian geese. 

He waits for the click of an imaginary drop to hit center.
Like a yellow traffic light at an intersection of any American city
He anticipates control. How did he ever arrive to this day so fast?
On the brink of sameness, when and why did he become Bob?
What happened to Mauricio? What if left unanswered, all he sees
In the field is a classroom where English clatters as an absent Mother?

Fucker, he adds. He pushes slightly the wall with his thumb. Only he knows he
 would have been
Another man. Gulliver, Zagajewski, Noriega, Captain Ahab, the silver man of the Adirondacks where
the humming birds by the cottages levitate around plastic feeding flowers. Maybe he should
Write that down, but with which hand or, for that matter, in which language?

He sizes up/down (measures) the watery circle beneath him. A tender circle as he aims his sight across
that lake. And there. A girl swims towards the island. Her back, glistening,
Smooth strokes, moving away from him under the summer heat. Year after year.
Island after island.  Where has she gone?  And her bulky belly where his son
And daughter once (he thinks pulling back) looked like Mauricio and Bob?

Now a perfect, round, wet spot on his pants shows a final arrival, an air drop of sentimental devaluation,
The untimed scorn, the glitch in which counting backwards seems an unforgiving mode of
Having to exist in a constant exit.

Just before he closes the door of his classroom for the last time, a lingering
Slap behind his ear rounds the corner of the white board with the old, familiar,
insistent but soft voice of his 3er grade teacher

Spic American, little boy?

No hay comentarios: