I Have an Art Job

I met somebody recently who teaches disadvantaged children

in Long Island – whose disadvantages apparently enlivened him,

once he had seen my gallery of creature features, to invite me

to provide the art for post card-sized depictions of teenagers

doing well – and seeming to be glad they were – in school. Three

views: my choice to choose among and from his pool of male

and female African-American, Latino, Asian and Caucasian

students: buddies reading, studying a chalked equation on

a blackboard, learning how to use a laptop. This meant, I thought –

although perhaps I hadn’t to ought to have – that I should stop

short of the brink beyond which my menagerie of many-limbed

and lumpy-headed species lived – whose strangenesses might

make this audience uneasy. So – ergo – I’ve done one of the three

and here he is, in rather a Pharaonic pose, in clothes I daresay

no one seventeen today would want to be seen dead in. That he

is offering the famous odd equation with which Einstein shocked

the world was not the outcome of some reasoned argument

that had unfurled to lead me somewhere I believed it wise

for troubled teens to see, reflect on as their academic fare.

I simply couldn’t think what else to put there. Two more drawings

to be done. Perhaps they’ll make me let them have more fun.

.