WRITING CLASS
BOSTON, 1957
BY PHILIP TABAKOW

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
The professor is waving his arms.
His eyes burn like falling cinders,
like sunlight through cracked glass
in the attic of a crumbling mansion.

The brittle girl in the back of the room
stares at him with total comprehension.
She thinks, "soapcake."
She forms the word "bootheel" 
with her thin, shapely lips,
envisions the rook in rainy weather,
the incandescent bodies of goddesses 
rising from chained bay waters.

Nearby, an alert housewife, 
feeling the fabric of blouse
brush across sensitive nipples,
recalls the glamour of sins, past and present:
thin crust of blood
atop the fetus's freshly-hatched head,
blonde virgin's midnight rendezvous 
with her saturnine inquisitor--
our wooden savior's delicate thighs.

The air crackles with a host of emanations.
And now, all along the front row, 
a phalanx of football poets is preparing
to tackle the exhilarated teacher
should those wires once again 
burn completely through their casings
and ravage his carefully composed mind
with a wildfire of feeling.
Philip Tabakow is Assistant Professor of English.