All Poems Are About Death
by Paul Hostovsky
They’re talking about tying teacher pay
to teacher performance,
and tying teacher performance
to student outcomes. They like to use words like
outcomes. They probably don’t read
much poetry, whoever they are,
and wouldn’t know a good line
if they wrote one. I remember Mr. Westrich though,
my 7th grade English teacher, who died
in a boating accident the summer I was 12.
I remember his performance—his
performances—the way he’d make us all laugh,
the way he’d interrupt us whenever we said
um or er. “Don’t burp,” he’d say
(he called um and er “burps”). We had to put
a penny in the jar every time we “burped.”
When the jar filled up, he said, he would buy us
a cake. And we’d all eat it together. He was as good as
his word. I hated school but I loved
Mr. Westrich. Whenever we said y’know
he’d interrupt us and say, “No, I don’t know,
tell me!” Our outcomes, if anyone cared
to measure them, spanned a lifetime
of not burping, of saying what we meant
instead of saying y’know. But his greatest performance
was dying like that, in high summer, on a sailboat,
or under a sailboat—I don’t remember
how it happened, only that it did, only that he died—his final
act. His perfect disappearance. No one I knew and loved
had ever died. He was the first one. It taught me
what can’t be put into words. It taught me
the ineffable. It was around that time
I first started making poems.
Paul Hostovsky's poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. paulhostovsky.com
