The Copy Room Sestina

I was thinking about still being a teacher forty years from now (that would make me 73. If you follow the news, that's probably not an unrealistic retiring age). It was a frightening prospect. Our lunch room at work is straight out of the late seventies. It's a time capsule; if you move the furniture around a bit, you'll uncover fallen scraps of old notes from 1982: grade macbeth papers! buy milk!

I wonder if I'll be there so long, I'll sit next to some young and beautiful 23 year old and say, "this room hasn't changed since I started here in 2004." She'll say, "2004! I was only a baby then!"

Anyway, pondering the mildewy decor of our English teacher's lounge, I was feeling a kinship with the ghosts of these women who have passed through the halls of schools for the past few decades. Women who chose career over marriage; women who taught briefly but left to have a family, maybe with a regretful heart, maybe with relief. Women who went on to do other things.

It made me imagine a character: the unmarried, slightly mysterious older English teacher...I've had a few...bright and elegant. Maybe I'm channeling the teachers my mother had in the '60s in parochial school. What were their lives really like? I hope their lives were filled with more than just decades of Gatsby scantrons and essay grading (yes, I know. Teaching is more than that. But you know what I mean).

Anyway, I'm proud to say I wrote a sestina thinking about this idea. A sestina alternates six ending words in a specific pattern. It's supposed to be in iambic pentameter, but I couldn't swing it.

The Copy Room Sestina

Before school I find the copier cold to touch.
It requires the murmur of a pulled switch: though books
have kissed its glass face, it won’t stir easily. My hands
stumble like white birds, trying to make the copy
of the essay about some story that is about you.
There is nowhere else like this room.

Here’s a hive, a humming place, a room
where a machine stings with ink should I touch
the wrong gear, the wrong wheel. You
might say it’s easier to submit each page
I need, every packet, to some secretary to copy,
but I find it simpler to use my own hands.

I try to hide them, my hands,
because the light hides nothing in this room
and I already feel old, I feel like a copy,
a copy of young girl once lit up by the touch
of autumn rain in her mouth. But all the pages
inside me have lost their master. What about you?

And now you have copies to do, too. How like you
to stroll up to the machine with your able hands
and yank the lid like it’s your car door, the page
of your Hemingway nonsense clogging up the room
with smoke and men and nothing anywhere about touch,
nothing original to say. You just have to make a copy.

I wonder if this whole room—this universe even— is a copy,
somewhere replica me and replica you
shoot like comets and collate, the only feature where papers touch
inside the copy machine as intimate and lovely as praying hands.
There is so much I can say about this room.
(It is also a sexy place. But we aren’t on the same page.)

The problem with early morning copying is this. I have this book.
I come in ahead of the mob and hope to make copies.
But I start to think I may die someday standing in this room.
My heart is still thing, but it beats, wanting something—you—?
And I can’t escape the notion that my hands,
like a old watchmaker’s, wind down days with only this touch.

Here is what I fear: you are here making copies.
I am in this room, seeing you.
I have not lived. I have only copied from a book.