May 31, 04

You’ll find less here, dear reader,
Than you’d find in the works of Joe Gould,
strung out among several composition books
Left among old friends, who could not read them.
But unlike those works, you’ll find my hand
Was steady enough in periods of excitement,
To write legibly, that in my closest approach
To Mt. Parnassus, my penmanship
Did not fail me, as it failed Joe Gould
Whether he wrote about a certain restaurant
Or the most important things in his life.

And there’s something to be said
About the penmanship lessons
Of my third grade teachers
dressed in the faded, floral-print
dresses of the Depression,
who, to inculcate against laziness,
Claimed, against agreed-upon laws of gravity,
That the descent was harder than the ascent,
That it was easier to rise than to fall.
We had to slant the letters right
So we turned the blue book diagonally
As Mrs. Bagley lorded over us.
How hard the soles of her shoes were
Against hardwood flooring or mosaic tiles.
We rewrote the alphabet in our blue books.
We were improving the look of the letter,
Our heads cocked, our hands aslant.
We embellished the same words the same way.
The scaffoldings of capitals had to lean
In identical directions with the sun
With the angle of light on tilted fenceposts
That told the most infirm that it was afternoon.
They leaned with the fenceposts
Of dairy farms, with milk-cows tails,
With mailboxes planted in sodden earth.

Left to our own devices, our penmanship
Would scrawl. Mrs. Bagley, born
Over a century ago, is less than dust.
Her point was, why should no one read you
From bad penmanship. You’ll disappear,
Like I have. If your signature
Has no rosetta stone, it isn’t special.
When agitated, your scrawl
Will be the flat line of polygraph
And the subject matter forgotten.

The coroner blinks at the autopsy,
And the graphologist scratches his head—
What made him angry, happy, disturbed,
Whatever he was, what kind of casualty.
He didn’t straighten his capitals,
He preferred to walk downstairs than up.