GLACIERS

Yesterday I picked up a black Ticonderoga number 2 pencil
and shoved the eraser tip into my ear
then shouted across the classroom,
What Jake, I can’t hear you. I’ve got a pencil in my ear. 
He was texting his mom. 
Mom, I need you.
Mom, get me some cake. 
Mom, the glaciers are melting, come get me now. 
 
Jake looked up like I was a mad Hungarian drunk
but that was okay because
with no hair on his face
who could argue
and who cares, really, what the hell you are
except that you are a guy
who cleans off the graffiti with bad words
and calls the graffiti with no bad words,
exhibitions.
 
Tell your mother I say hello, I said to Jake.
What? he said,
like he had no idea what I was talking about
except he had every idea
and that’s when I took the Ticonderoga number 2 pencil
and stuck it between my upper lip and nose,
made it a black little mustache, screamed
Hitler. 
 
The boy, Blake, next to me, said That’s not funny
and the fire drill bell rang--
it rang and rang and rang--
so that hours later I was on my couch thinking:
What the hell were you thinking?
 
I was thinking,
silence.
It’s what I think all the time
when doubled over in boredom
in front of the students.
I think: say the most absurd thing
and for just that one split second,
that moment when the word registers inside their brains,
there will be nothing for them to say. 
There will just be the quiet--         
a slowly moving block of ice
getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

BIG MAC BUN
(for Deb Ellman)

McDonalds stinks off of I-95
headed north into New Hampshire. 
Deb gets a mushroom burger and a Coke. 
I inhale two cheeseburgers and a Dr. Pepper. 
The whole thing feels a bit like a whisper, some kind of silly secret
between her and I
that the rest of the world—the wives, husbands, the skinny nutritionists—
can’t know.  What would they think of us,
a couple of wayward indulgers, indulging?
McDonalds is for the young, the obese, the drunk college kid after the fall.
Not for a couple of middle aged Jews
with bad stomachs
that rip and tear when the good American junk has its day. 
But we’re in it, the Big Mac bun, the smooth mix of mustard, pickle, ketchup
with a shot of soda to make it all good. 
And what of the moment?  
It occurs to me that we are Buddhists in our McDonald flurry of nowness. 
You want a burger? 
I want a burger. 
Let’s get a burger. 
So we pull off the freeway and there they are, wrapped--
little golden jewels of spring tulips and decay. 
Wouldn’t it be beautiful if it were that easy all the time? 
You want a field of clover? 
I want a field a clover. 
Let’s get a field of clover. 
An anvil. 
A kiss. 
A slow, half cockeyed kiss in the midnight air
right before the summer air forgets itself for autumn.  
The world would go on forever like this,
everything just as it is,
the now of the nowness of now.
Deb and me in the fried stink of The Golden Arches
ordering barely edible burgers,
sitting in lotus positions on the oily floor,
the whir of The McFlurry Machine
lifting us a bit off the ground
in one big carbohydrate rush of perfection and Ohm,
the Big Mac Buddha in sight,
smiling from a treetop right before our giddy eyes.

BABY FAT

When high school is over most people get fat. 
I got fat in
high school.  The math teacher told me
there was nothing I could do, algebraically,
about the girth.
My social studies teacher wished me luck
on the battlefields and governing rooms of the rest of my life,
suspenders to hold up the pants,
handkerchiefs to wipe the brow. 
I couldn’t figure if they were being mean or just a bunch of realists. 
In high school all I wanted was a thousand girlfriends in ninth grade,
twelve hundred in twelfth. 
No one was interested.  Not even the boys
that reminded me of girls. 
That’s why I got fat. 
My English teacher gave me a bonsai tree. 
It’s as close as you are going to get, she said.
I went home and licked the thing till my tongue was a prune. 
Downstairs the fridge burned with pineapple and apple.  
By midnight, everything was gone, even the ice. 
Then I went to college, Italy, big buildings with many desks.
Ever since, I’ve been trying to get back to high school. 
Trying to be a skinny kid in the cafeteria,
my face buried in a calculus book because I know all the answers, my physics
physical, my essay on Proust
as Dickens as it can get
without too many words to mess up the tongue. 
A skinny kid so skinny that my arms magnify themselves
just enough that the blonde cheerleader named Sue
and the brunette surfer named Lorraine
whisper my name at the lockers
like it is some kind of exotic butterfly from Tahiti. 
It’s all so silly though—fat this, skinny that,
blubber, toothpick, Humpty fucking Dumpty. 
I’m wasting my time at the gym, I figure, I figure
if I never went to high school, if I farmed The Plains,
if we all farmed The Plains,
maybe the kids in high school now
would be walking around as fat and as skinny as they were—no issues—
and the teachers wouldn’t be saying a damn thing except
a squared plus b squared = c squared, quiz on Monday.

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© Copyright, 2012, Matthew Lippman.
All rights reserved.