Show & Tell

This poem is for you, Miss Birnbaum, my once-upon-
a-time 4th-grade teacher, whom I shall never
never forget. Back in the fall of '49,
while the invincible Yankees, golden as ever,

were beating the worthy (but vincible) Red Sox
on the greendsward enclosure which the late Bart
Giamatti used to call our New World paradise,
back when the Russians had just ended the short-

lived U.S. hegemony created by those twin
phoenixes rising sublimely over Hiroshima
& Nagasaki, ending our invincibility by detonating
their own version of an H-bomb, and that a monster,

at that very moment, Levittown, Long Island
(that ex-potato-farm & homemade muddy eden
for all those GIs like my father as well as other
huddled masses living in  New York's superheated

flats and tenements) was still so new, it didn't
even have a school which at that particular instant
it could call its own. Those one-storied brick
& plastic wonders still lay in the "not-too-distant

& foreseeable future," like our wonder malls.
The answer was to bus us kids across the tracks,
over to your four-storied ancient redbrick school
in picturesque Old Bethpage, replete with its oaks

& maples out of Norman Rockwell. The leaves
then were in their autumn beauty, flame red
& flame gold. My imitation leather shoes squeaked
with every step I took across your sun-bled

dusty wooden floor. And when my sad pants
at last split up the back, you gathered three other
teachers, ladies like yourself, and made me
bend over in the courtyard, amid a smother

of giggles, to pick up stones for you,
my backside showing through the tear, much ah!
much to your delight, Miss B, until one woman
had the decency to call the torture

to a halt. And now that I am twice the age
you were back then, Miss B, now before the bell
dismisses both of us for good, I want to thank you,
especially for the morning ritual of Show & Tell.

Everyone did Show & Tell, you reassured me.
Everyone. Tomorrow it would be my turn, you said,
to do my Show & Tell. I worked hard that night,
sweating cold sweat to try & make a card.

Scissors, ribbon, old crayons, a piece of pretty paper,
Except at home we had no tape or glue & I knew
we had no money, then, for sure, for either
tape or glue. I even tried to make a home brew

of flour mixed with water, but the batter
wouldn't stick. Nothing stuck. Finally, I sewed
the goddamn thing together & made my card for you:
a red heart rampant on a piece of yellowed board

which, Miss B, I remember you holding at arm's length
between your thumb and forefinger, away from you,
and, before that class of strangers, asking why,
instead of sewing it, I hadn't simply glued

the thing together, the way any of the other
children would have done. I said nothing then,
or when I had to take the others' jeers
down on the playing field that noon, or even when

I got back home and hid, or at anytime since then,
except, Miss Birnbaum, the kid grew up the way
kids do. Eventually, the boy from the other side
of town even learned to read & write & say

things properlike, and make a proper bow.
And now, Miss B, though you may already be in hell
& I left speaking to a ghost, I have come back to try
and get it right this time. This is my Show & Tell.


Paul Mariani