Deaf English Teacher

 

He had the most beautiful fingerspelling.
So elegant, delicate, clean.
He had only to spell his name and all the deaf girls

turned into titters and sighs.
Surrounding him in the hallway, they'd escort him to class:
a bobby-socked amoeba oohing and aahing,
blushing and shifting shape around the nucleus

of his right hand.
A somewhat feminine yet not unmasculine hand,
it was a reader's hand
that lived among words because it loved words

and probably learned to love words from other hands
that loved words before it,
that wrote them down or just spelled them out in the air
lovingly.

And though none of the deaf girls loved words quite the way he did,
they loved his way, and they loved his hands,
and they loved.

And so years later when the girls were grown and the hand
was still--
though some of the girls had found love and some had not,
though some had learned to love words and some had not--

they all got together again to remember
how they all loved once,
so long ago now that it was hard to recall
his face anymore, or even his words exactly.

But his vowels, his consonants,
who could forget those long intelligent fingers
lighting the little fires that caught in their chests
and throats, and blazed up in their breathing until they could find

no words themselves, could give him only their eyes,
their eyes reflecting his words dancing away
like smoke through the singing air.

 

 

High School Reunion

 

Ralph Santillo says he's in sanitation.
And he says he doesn't remember me.
And I wonder if sanitation and Santillo
are somehow related etymologically
besides being historically entwined
since the 10th grade

when he and the other neighborhood toughs
hung out at the municipal dump
smoking grass and swapping
their draping girlfriends. He doesn't
remember swaggering up to me
(a girl named Frankie

in tow) with the unmistakable posture
of a furniture mover I didn't call
because I wasn't moving
--come to help me move,
to favor me with the falling pianos
of his attentions.

He wanted only one thing: a fight
which I wouldn't give him--not
(though I tried to give the impression)
that my deep commitment to nonviolence
and my contempt for all forms of adolescent besting
forbade it--

but because I was chicken shit. I didn't
give him a fight because I didn't have a fight
in me. And he knew it. And that felt
like being known--in a slavish sort of biblical
sense I've carried around with me ever since.
O vestigial

orifice! pit where the scuttling rats
of history chew and copulate in their own excreta!
O garbage dumps of childhood
where the Ralph Santillos who don't
even remember us
are still at work.

 

--Paul Hostovsky

 

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