Paul Siegell

Pass/Fail

 

 

In his head: Friday 1963 America; pop’s

teaching experience of 21: only a veteran

of marriage to mother for exactly five days—

October 25 & the Selective Service has him

 

standing on a line in his underwear and

lower Manhattan’s 100 Whitehall Street—

plus, at front a-this line he’s on: a bunch a-

bodies gettin’ blood siphoned into vials.

 

My father’s jiggling: Like twenty guys

just passed out; ev’rybody’s laughing

and the ARMY guys, you know how they get,

all yellin’ and screamin’, makin ev’rybody

turn around an’ shut up—

 

A few hours further in all this, after

they graded his intelligence test, my father’s

sitting one-on-one in a small office at a small desk

w/ a guy in tight-uniform holding up his scores

in a militant right hand: You just graduated

with a B.S. in Accounting from N.Y.U.,

the guy says, and did this lousy!

 

Heaviness jiggles again.

 

After he’d finish’d the draft’s written exam,

my father comes outta Whitehall’s testing room

to walk into a guy named Bob Johnson—an old

Flushing High, 1959 frat brother—a guy he

hadn’t seen in, like, 4 years & they start

holy shitting each other, shakin’ hands.

 

Their reunion picks up from shared realities

of just graduating college & Bob goes: So,

how’d you do on that written exam?

& my dad whispers: I purposely flunked it.

Bob’s like: Why? & my dad says: ‘Cause I

didn’t want to be a forward artillery observer

in Vietnam—

                        Ho-ly shit! Bob is shock’d;

why didn’t I think of that? he says—  

 

& my father then said he never saw the guy again.

 

 

 

 

Paul Siegell is the author of Poemergency Room (Otoliths Books, 2008) and the forthcoming  jambandbootleg (A-Head, 2009). He is a staff editor at Painted Bride Quarterly, and has contributed to The American Poetry Review, BlazeVOX, Dusie, MiPO, No Tell Motel and other fine journals. For more of Paul's jonx, kindly visit his ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL.