Poetry Corner Wednesday

There's Poetry Corner Monday, and then there's Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It. Clearly this is the latter. In my defense, I meant to post this on Monday. I just didn't.

I dedicate this week's poem, by Billy Collins, to all my former English teachers. (Hockley, I love and miss you and think of you each and every day.) I've often wondered if teachers thought about the musings of this speaker (who I will refer to as "the speaker" for all my professors who cautioned me against assuming that the poet/author is the voice of the poem/story, even though I know for a fact that the speaker is Collins himself. Let it be known that I have sufficient evidence to back up this claim, but I will refrain from presenting it here for the sake of brevity.)

Schoolsville

Glancing over my shoulder at the past,
I realize the number of students I have taught
is enough to populate a small town.

I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,
chalk dust flurrying down in winter,
nights dark as a blackboard.

The population ages but never graduates.
On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park
and when it's cold they shiver around stoves
reading disorganized essays out loud.
A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags
into the streets with their books.

I forgot all their last names first and their
first names last in alphabetical order.
But the boy who always had his hand up
is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.
The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
leans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine.

Their grades are sewn into their clothes
like references to Hawthorne.
The A's stroll along with other A's.
The D's honk whenever they pass another D.

All the creative-writing student recline
on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.
Wherever they go, they form a big circle.

Needless to say, I am the mayor.
I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.
I rarely leave the house. The car deflates
in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing.

Once in a while a student knocks on the door
with a term paper fifteen years late
or a question about Yeats or double spacing.
And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane
to watch me lecturing the wallpaper,
quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.