Margaret Rinkel's Poems

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He scowled at the barrel brimming 

with pickles, eyed the bulging licorice crock

and stumped across bare boards cracking

with each thrust of the scarred peg leg,

a staccato reminder of his sawmill years.  

His worn cheeks smothered words 

he dared not speak, "Get on with it,"

as if time mattered.  Business was slow.

In silence he scooped and bagged the meal,

smiles too wasteful, talk too cheap to inquire

whether Harding or Coolidge did more

to help the jobless.  His hands

pressed the crevices of the counter,

silence broken when coins 

settled in the cash box or the customer 

tallied too high an account.

"Due in full, first of the month."

And the screen door banged shut.

His dismissive eye stared

at the portrait the boy had sketched

On grocery wrap.  He countered the notion

head-on. "Drawing? Waste of time--

seventh grade--?  no son of mine--utter folly." 

His yellowed collar worked up and down.  

He spat and crushed the drawing in hands

stained with toil.  "Deal in useless stuff,

relish the rod."  His words spent, he whacked

at a fly and stooped to tedious feedbags,

unraveling knots of pent-up pain,

an old man bent to his work,

a boy stirring to unspent dreams.

Not an ordinary day:

fifth grade—unsteady hand

faltered at the blackboard

scraping sentence shards

for subject and verb, scrutiny

crumbling shallow syntax to dust

under burning glare, unerring judgment,

she smug behind the lens of teaching.

“. . . Thought you were smart.”

Shattered sensitivity, my desk

dismal refuge for a transfer untutored

In the subtle tools of language.

Not an ordinary day:

Seventh grade—my questioning hand,

pencil crisscrossing hollow air

to sense the wayward storm on paper.

Her stentorian voice, unerring judgment:

“. . . feel it to write it,”

then turned to shape up other scribblers.

No help to dig through earthy idioms

or sense staccato shapes, grinding sands,

flailing rocks that pounded jagged rhythms

of thunderbolts and lightning.  No help

to tame the delicate surface of inspiration.

Not an ordinary day:

eighth grade—the gathering of language

to brush away “unsmart, “unfeeling”

from self-esteem’s dark corners.

“Imagine shadows of three tiny vessels

cast on new world sands. . .new stirrings

from flat pages of the history text.

“. . . Simple words can dance, delight,

spin new sights and sounds,

find new cadences in ordinary things,”

shaping wonder, restoring order to my world

through the lens of teaching.