Getting Ahead

A college job was standing

In shade with a rake,

Another was pulling weeds

By the fistful-bitter tufts

Yanked with the chant,

She loves me, she loves me not.

I had both of these jobs

In junior college,

And one Cinco de Mayo limped home

With a stone in my left shoe.

My brother had the better job

Of painting numbers on

Curbs. I clopped home,

Lame as a burro,

And floated in water,

Me a geography major

Without one turn in the Seven Seas.

I rolled in the bathtub

Like a whale and got out

Dripping. My hippie brother joked,

Oh, geographer, where didst thou go?

I answered, O, Picasso of stencil-numbered curbs,

To the depths of our one-foot tub.

We ate Top Ramen

And looked from our balcony.

The whole town needed a raking

And numbers on the curbs.

We were getting ahead. In Economic

Geography, we took field trips,

Once to blink at blinking chickens

And another to a garment shop,

Mexican women like our mothers,

The voodoo of pins jutting from their mouths.

This didn't make me happy,

Nor did the trip

To a small airfield.

When the crop duster pilot cranked the propeller,

The wind of its blurring spin

Pulled homework from our arms-

Binder paper beating like gulls.

We screamed, laughed, and tiptoed for the homework,

For the B's and A's dancing above our heads-

That day, in propeller wind,

The true case of inflated grades.