John Rearick
WHAT SEPARATES US FROM THE BEASTS
“My brother-in-law lay in a comma,”
And this is all wrong from my prescriptive view.
Emotions are fine, and some of the world’s great art
Doffs its renaissance cap to unpredictable Caravaggio passions,
But I want the Parthenon clarity of diagrammed sentences,
standard spelling, and Fowler’s Modern English Usage
(First edition, before the brokered concessions and exceptions.)
To keep things on track and manageable.
For instance, I write redly in the margin next to
My rash and irresponsible mental first line (see above)
“Lay only with direct objects, use ‘lies”; and then I
Strike down that extra “m” with a bolt from my Parker Flair.
Expertly done, naturally, after 40 years of exorcizing student essays
About the deaths of pets, grandparents, state championship expectations,
Romances, piano careers, aunts with cancer, and baseball card collections.
Language, after all, is what separates us from the beasts.
But the beasts start to nose around, even in this hospital, threatening to bite.
I can’t help remembering how this unconscious almost lifeless form once
Showed me that pineapple wasn’t grown in a can,
Bought me my first Szechuan meal,
Drove me to my college interview,
Introduced me to Rilke, Zen, and Patti Smith,
Switched on the light, scattering the roaches of my unique teenage dread.
Then inside this U.S. News and World Reports Best Regional Trauma site,
Someone starts sounding like a beast, sniffles and inarticulate whimpers,
And it’s me, and the snot that is rising to meet the tears doesn’t care
About the proper pronoun or write “Awk” next to a redundant fragment
that sounds something like “lub,” or “lu,” or even “la.”
John Rearick is a high school English teacher who lives with his wife, Liz, in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn. They have two grown sons and a granddaughter. John grew up on Long Island, went to school in New York and Virginia, has a small collection of manual typewriters, and is doing his best to learn Japanese.