the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 446, Dec. 17, 2003
Bill Zavatsky (1943- )
“I have a plan I have
thought out,” Pilon said. “When I was a little boy, we lived by the railroad.
Every day when the train went by, my brothers and I threw rocks at the engine,
and the firemen threw coal at us. Sometimes we picked up a big bucketful of
coal and took it in to our mother.”
—John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
“Loose lips sink ships,” they used to say in the war.
Off-the-cuff conversations, uttered in innocence, could, in fact, hurt and
kill. Be wary.
In personal life, the loose-lips issue is still
something I have great difficulty with. What can I say without getting into
trouble? What should I say not to get into trouble? How can I be myself if I
must always assay who I am relative to who is in the room? On the phone?
Listening around the corner?
I ran into this recently with a little project I
worked on with another person and put a lot of effort into. It went this way
and that, here and there. In the end, I was proud of what we had accomplished.
Then, the thing fell apart—on all things, the cost of
the end product.
All right, negotiation, compromise. A little more
work. Honest effort, I think. That’s all. Hard work, after all, is the basis of
just about everything I believe in. That and honesty and fairness.
In my naïve way, I went along this happy, if
difficult path, until I had a conversation in which I talked about the person
paying for the project to his employee. What I said was honest but intended in
greatest love and laughable interest—an example of his business practice as
insight to the man’s character, which is of highest integrity. After all, he is
a man I greatly admire and trust.
But, like the child’s game where the kids sit in a
circle and utter a sentence from ear to ear to see how it transmutes from the
first child to the last, the example was communicated in a way that did not
include my intention, had no semblance of my love and admiration for the man.
I sit here today, at my poetrysheet desk, feeling sort of naked, writing a very personal
entry, the sort of journal entry I never intended for this page. Things have
blown up, become very nasty, personal, and vindictive. I have reacted poorly and
have now many amends to make.
Moreover, I want to forget the whole business ever
happened, to take back the last ten or so days, to say no when I know I should
have. I want more than ever to excise the greed and lust for a quick score that
I indulged to get into the project in the first place.
But I will finish this page, as I always do, and take
a deep breath. I will put aside the horrible feelings that come with being who
I am all the time, in every situation, and try to learn to be more…professional.
And I will ask myself again what I have to do today
to make things right
Because all I really want to do is write.
Today’s poem:
head rolled up on the elm stump
in the sun yesterday—
smile gone, eyes lost,
dogs chewed the boots up
carrot nose lies in grass-pocked melt,
hat blown up by the door,
scarf blinks in a tree branch
in a dirty ball of ice,
a glove waves at the end of a stick
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