-the old english teacher who had nothing to say-

old man J.J. Harrington struggled.

he tried to get through to us by reading weary
sentences from a page in a book.

he said the albatross hung around in the air.

he told us the boat

lay flat in the water.

he asked if any of us had taken the time

to look-up the definition of “eftsoons”

as he’d suggested the day before.
no one did.
ours, was a non-preparatory course of study.  

last night, all we thought about were our girlfriends,

driving around in cars, fooling around in the tunnel of love.

when the bell rang, old J.J. stood flat-footed,

his stubbled mouth agape as the lost

boys of the Tech Course Group hurried through the door

to Woodwork Shop with old man Marsden.

there, I grabbed a piece of pine from the barrel of woods

and lathed it down to a fine representation

of the Vanguard missile which blew-up

on its launching pad at Cape Canaveral in '57

embarrassing the Americans in the face of the Commies

and their fat, ugly rockets poised to blow us to smithereens.

In my wood-fashioned Vanguard, I saw the liftoff,

the flames of ignition, the power of its mighty thrusters, then

a few feet up and the sickening yaw, like a brilliant

pendulum, one sickening shift to port,

one sickening shift to starboard, a realtime

slow motion dance of death on television, the beautiful,

sleek, bullet-shaped Vanguard, hung-still

over its cloud of smoke, of flame and fuel,
its nosecone tipping over in the last gesture of life, 

the Vanguard sinking to the molten pad of its birth,

disintegrating into its own womb of fire.

that, J.J., is what I saw in the little stick of pine,

the wood still hot from the spinning lathe in the palms of my hands.
all we needed was a little imagery, J.J.––

I coulda been a poet, J.J.—

I coulda been somebody.