I Speak to the Girl Some Dim Boy Loves

By Colleen J. McElroy b. 1935

(after Hugo)

It takes the table girl a week to learn the route:

The patient spray of table tops, the swirl of cloth

The food to scrap and dishes on the belt become

Her world—students at their complicated books

Are of another life—but in six months

A year or less, she’ll have their manners down:

A little splash of color to her polyester dress

A flick of wrist or hair, a lipstick smear and

She’ll be more like one of them than any of them dates.

This is the state solution—employing her kind

Here among the population who decides

The number of any kind a society can abide.

We are the learned few, the two or three

Who make the rules, who read the books

That tell us how humane we’ve made this life:

The charity of how we grow polite enough

To pin the handicapped to our routines.

The table girl keeps thirty tables clean

And speaks only to the boy who works the dishes

From conveyer belt to sink, who elevates and leaves

Her hopeful as her dyed blonde hair.

But her face will not grow beyond its flat despair

And I believe I’ve fathomed all of this alone as dishes

Slip across the belt’s rubber sheet, until one day

I place humanity beside my Goodwill stare and ask:

How goes your day? She says: “Monday, Clive dropped

The baby on its head—things ain’t been the same since.

Birds seem louder—the stream is down to a trickle.

I ’spect we’ll bury the baby tomorrow.” My cup falls over.

She clatter-bangs more dishes on the belt.

Source: Sleeping with the Moon (University of Illinois Press, 2007)

Biography

Colleen McElroy was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a military family that moved often. She earned a PhD in ethnolinguistic patterns of dialect differences and oral traditions from the University of Washington. McElroy has written short stories, plays, television scripts, and nonfiction; her collections of poetry include Winters without Snow (1979); Queen of the Ebony Isles (1984), winner of the American Book Award from the . . .

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