So, the student stops by the house
of his English teacher
to pick up a younger member of his family who’s
taking music lessons from the English teacher’s wife,
and he comes into the study to say hello
and the English teacher minimizes his Facebook page
so that the student doesn’t know
that this is one of the ways his English teacher
spends his time at home.
Afterward, the English teacher writes a poem
about it because it strikes him, somehow,
as a very strange thing that he’s done, this minimizing
of Facebook, or because it makes him feel odd,
like he’s almost been caught doing something bad, or, at least,
caught doing something he’s self-conscious about,
something he doesn’t want his students, or this
particular student, to think he does all the time.
The English teacher can’t quite settle the dilemma,
doesn’t quite know how or what to think about the issue,
but eventually comes to feel all right about the whole thing,
liberated as he now feels from the earlier worry of the day
that he would never find another idea for a new poem.
michael jarmer 