Untitled Document
ecopoem #11
coming in august to
uis
our newest residence hall
announcement with pictures “founders hall” in honor of
our
founders it will go green
have a leafy roof as one of
those founders
yes a few
of us are still around I will
donate a pair of goats to
live
on the roof keep it trimmed
what pleasure for us below
and oh
how small will be
their carbon hoofprints
© Jacqueline Jackson 2008
Though at the time it may not occur to us to call it
“mentoring,” there’s likely to be a good deal of that
sort of thing going on, wanted or unwanted, whenever a young person works
for someone older. Richard Hoffman of Massachusetts does a good job of
portraying one of those teaching moments in this poem.
Summer Job
“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny,
my boss, once told me, “is that they don’t know
nothing till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,”
he said, “he gets to middle age — and by
the way, he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy
until he’s forty, forty-five, and then you give him
five more years until that craziness peters out, and now he’s almost fifty — a guy like that at
last explains to himself that life is made of time, that time is what it’s all about. Aha! he says. And then he either blows his brains out, gets religion, or settles down to some major-league depression. Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights torque wrench — no, you moron, the other
one.”
Poem copyright © 2006 by Richard Hoffman, and
reprinted from his most recent book of poetry, Gold Star Road (Barrow Street Press,
2007). Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. American
Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is
also supported by the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. poet laureate 2004-2006. For more information, go to
www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2008.
