LINGUISTICS
CLASS
1.
What must it sound
like,
The idiom of our
tongue,
If you have come from other
shores:
Listening to
tapes
In classrooms below
ground,
Beads of dampness on cold
cinderblock,
Trying to apprehend small
meanings
(Preposterous
proposition):
Run
in, run over, run down;
Dress down, dress out, dress
up.
Would it be the
same
For someone to come on to
you,
Or come out?
2.
Language, quixotic, carries
weight
It cannot
bear.
A boy spent hours in
practice—
Tennis, piano scales, free
throws.
Later he practiced
medicine,
His sister practiced
law,
Always getting ready, it
seemed,
For something
else.
At the
restaurant
He thought of a bad
pun
And made a
note:
He also waits
Who only stands and serves.
3.
Language tells you what it
sees,
So pejorative
becomes
Normative.
I want to hear about
people
Who are ept, couth,
Ruthful, clueful souls
with
Shevelled
hair.
Do you remember when
we
Worried about creeping
-ism’s?
Neologism;
Barbarism,
An ancient word, meant
to
Mock the sound
of
Those who do not talk like
you.
4.
The English teacher had
asked
A Latin student of
mine
About the mood of a
piece;
Dark,
foreboding were
answers
He had in
mind.
Subjunctive, the boy replied. Others
laughed,
As though wit might somehow lie
in
The hand tools on my father’s
bench,
Which I could
neither name nor use.
If I was you, I
joked,
I’d pay more
attention
To the future less
vivid,
The present contrary to
fact.
Robert Demaree is the author of two
book-length collections of poems, including Mileposts, October 2009, published by
Beech River Books, and a chapbook, Things
He Thought He Already Knew, published online in 2007 by Slow Trains. A third book-length collection will be
published in late spring 2014. The winner of the 2013 Burlington Writers Club
Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina,
Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where he lives four months of the year. He has
had over 650 poems published or accepted by 150 periodicals. For further
information see http://www.demareepoetry.
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