3 poems by Paul Hostovsky
Sick Well
He was good at being sick.
After all, he'd been sick for
a very long time.
It wasn't a saleable skill
at first. But when more and more people
began to get sick
he realized he knew something
they didn't. When you're sick
be sick. That
is how to be sick well.
How to be sick well would eventually
become the title
of his first book, which was a best seller.
People who got sick read it
and learned how.
And it was a revolutionary book because
throughout history people who got sick
tried to get well
and often died trying. But until now
no one had ever thought of trying
to be sick well. That
was truly something new. And dying well
would have been the title of his second book
but he died well
before it could.
Little Things
Me and Beth Jeannette had a little thing.
This was a long time ago when my
thing was little and I didn't know anything
about such things. Somehow we ended up
upstairs in her bedroom on her bed
with her face very close to mine and a little
pimply. Her eyes were soft, her hands were
busy. My hands were folded politely
in my lap, as though waiting for tea or
poetry. My eyes roamed the walls and found
an M.C. Escher print with tessellating
staircases, and I climbed them peripherally
while Beth continued to block my view
with her nose. In the end, our little thing
was like those staircases--it went nowhere
though it seemed to be going somewhere,
especially when she touched my thing and I
had to go to the bathroom. All these years later
I look back on that little thing with fondness
and tenderness, and a little sadness as though
I were looking back from deep within infinity
at my first tender, tentative tessellations.
October
Everybody called him Toby,
though his real name was October,
though nobody knew that except the teacher
who assured him his secret was safe with her
that first day in September, when he came in
early, before any of the other kids
and introduced himself to her,
and told her about his hippie parents
who had named him October
because they loved October
and because they got married in October,
and so a year later in October
he was born October. She said
she thought it was a lovely name and a lovely
story. But he said it was an affliction.
He told her how the kids in his old school
called him Ock. Or else they called him Brr.
They made fun of him in cruel ways, like rubbing
their arms and stamping their feet when he passed,
saying: "Brr, it's cold in here." They teased him
about June, the bookish girl with the thick glasses,
saying lewd things like: "It feels like October
in June." It got so bad he had to move away
and start his life over. His hippie father
put in for a transfer. His mother who did macrame
could do macrame anywhere, so they moved
here. And he started anew, with a new name,
a new identity. It was not unlike
the federal witness protection program,
except his parents felt guilty as hell
and were never prosecuted.