Mark Center

I grew up in a small, rural community in northwest Ohio. This poem captures a memory of my school days.

It was Mrs. Dodson, I think,

all cat-eye glasses and spindly limbs,

she of the stern stare of a

fourth grade teacher

in a tomb of a town called

Mark Center;

 

yes, it was she who told us of

Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain;

it was she what baptized us into the faith

of celebrated jumping frogs,

and child prophets named

Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

 

Not that we weren’t willing acolytes;

we were simple country kids,

farmers’ and factory workers’ children;

caught bull frogs in the boggy remnants

of the Great Black Swamp;

ran barefoot on muddy creek shores;

swam in chocolate water;

fished and trapped and hunted;

Tom and Huck spoke in tongues

that tickled our ears

and sounded a lot like home.

 

She told us how Mark Twain

was a river term for sounding depth,

a pseudonym, new vocabulary word,

spelling counts.

 

My aha moment:

Mark Center

must be the center of something!

That’s a good topic for research,

please prepare a one page report for Monday,

spelling counts.

 

Eighteen daggers in my back

from classmates’ eyes�"

stupid curiosity,

we were ‘spostah’ go fishin’,

now we gotta write a stupid report,

can’t leave well enough alone.

 

But there was the blotch

on the plat

that dad pulled out for me that night,

Mark Township,

six miles by six miles of

flat squares,

of corn, soy bean, wheat,

cows, pigs and sheep,

and at the center of it all,

not quite geometrically,

but close enough for horseshoes,

was Mark Center,

unincorporated community,

center of my nine-year-old universe,

pseudonym for nowhere.

Author's Note

tone, visualization