HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH

Homenaje a la Maestría

By Levi Romero

I

not long after my high school English teacher
had passed the colored pencils out
I summoned her attention

I can’t see what I’m writing, Mrs. Rhutasel!
I called out
she laughed
I knew you’d pick the white pencil
she said

she had come to know me by then
through my daily journal entries
and unending stream of poetry and essay submissions
my passion for writing, my disdain for authority
my clumsiness with conformity

she, my first audience, harshest critic, and first truly devoted fan

I was the quiet, quiet, introverted skinny kid
with way past the shoulder length hair
and a Levi jacket on my back through every season
inside myself, I looked liked bearded Whitman
but probably more realistically resembled my tio Eliseo thumbing,
in kerosene lantern light, through the Farmer’s Almanac
his green plastic billed reading cap
at a forty-five degree angle to the page

it was a love-hate relationship, me and Mrs. Rhutasel
I linguistically steering myself through the muted storm between us
Communicating through punctuation marks and grammatical rules
flecked like little black sugar ants charting out across the page
and her “I like that, good job!” exclamated notations steering me along

one day I’m just gonna write a book
without commas or periods or question marks!
I told her
well, that’s fine!
she told me
but, don’t leave them out on account
that you don’t know where they belong!

II

in my dormitory room I read Rimbaud, Steinbeck, and Camus
I stared out through the window at the leafless trees
and sky the color of faraway from home lonesomeness
I listened to music, studied songs and lyrics
Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. I
Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison
Al Hurricane, Los Purple Haze, Freddie Brown
and a two-album Vanguard collection of Mississippi
Delta Blues

my scratched albums turning
with a quarter cent piece
set on the stereo’s needle arm
to keep the music from skipping
as one week, one season, one year
one adolescent tragedy
spun into another

and when the weather warmed
I walked the railroad tracks
and I laid out my jacket and my longing and my desperation
and I waited on the westbound trains I never hopped,
an aching for my recently deceased father
roaring through me like the rattley-clackitty-whistling
Atkinson and Topeka

it was springtime and back home
one brother was cleaning out the ditches
and the other one was looking for the pruning shears, I was sure

after walking the rails
I headed back toward campus
with an overly fondled copy
of Bound for Glory in my back pocket
hoping to catch a quick game of pick-up ball before dinner
and a long, cool glimpse of that one girl
what was her name?

oh, I can still smell the sweet grass
and hear the sprinklers going strong
something ‘bout her in a tight red t-shirt
in that time long ago now gone

III

I liked girls that had good penmanship
and could exercise the rules of proper grammar correctly
knowing where to put the comma and the period
and the semi colon meant something
I don’t know what, but I had an attraction to it
It may have come from a time back in 4th grade
when I had beat the prettiest and smartest girl
in a spelling bee contest

that year I had risen out of the ranks of the “D-group” students
the ones bound for prison and/or a life lived
and terminated before the age of thirty
the ones who spoke the Spanish of their grandparents
as a first language
with accents thick and soft and musky
as the upturned earth rolling off
their grandfather’s horse drawn plows

the ones who found themselves having to make accommodations
in their inherited world perspective for Biff and Tiff
and the prospect of a janitorial job or a starched mechanic’s shirt
with their real baptismal-given-name scrawled across
their lapel in cursive writing

and I can still smell the waxy fat orange crayon
melting on a sunlit desktop
while I stood in the corner where they sent little boys
who wanted to draw cars instead of turkeys and pumpkins,
the rest of the class behind me
slumping over their assignments
like neat rows of punctuation marks

and I knew what an apostrophe was and how to use it
without having ever having been told
though I refrained from using it
since I knew that knowing more
than you were supposed to know
meant that your silence couldn’t be trusted
and sa-na-magón-sito you’d better darn well know it!

IV

In Junior High, el culon Fatso
the music appreciation teacher
flung up his orchestrating arms one more and a half final time
and marched off to the admin office to charm the secretaries
and sip on soft drinks while we sat stewing in the overheated
metal annex building co-authoring pages of “I shall not hit anyone”
for the bullies who’d hit you again
if you didn’t write your share
of their 900 lines

But, that was before boarding school and Mrs. Rhutasel

V

In boarding school the first thing they said to me
was the last thing they said to me
which was “if you don’t cut your hair, you can’t come to school here”

Maria, the school’s ESL teacher, counselor, and friend of Mrs. Rhutasel’s
heard from someone that I was an artist and wrote poetry
she’d heard from someone that my father had recently died

I, being fluent in Spanish, proclaimed that I had no need
for bilingual classes and my strong self-determination
and inner anti-wimpiness mocked the need for counselors

But, Maria called me out of the hall one day
befriended me and lip-pointed me toward
a blank wall crying out for a mural

hay esta, she said, pinta lo que quieras

and then she reached into her desk drawer
and handed me my first collection of literature
“Literatura Chicana: Texto y Contexto”

toma, she said, something I think you’ll like

VI

El Louie and Un Trip Through the Mind Jail

¡a la maquina, a la mode, a la mustard!

my literary senses were startled awake
by the language and themes
that these two poems were revealing to me

the colloquial poetics of a poetic voice
sounding like mine
written in that distinct dialectical syntax
of those dudes hanging out
behind the school gym
remember the flunked out older guys
sitting in the seats behind you
sling-shotting their index finger
at the back of your skull?

it was a voice like that!

hey, before then
I thought a poet
had to sound
like Frost, Whitman,
or Dickinson

I didn’t know
I could write and sound
like Jose Montoya and Raul Salinas

and make the language of the page
seem like it was coming
from the tongue of my
deepest personal introverted
most unpunctuated

pero  bien  locotote  self!