“You whispered that in her ear?” he says.” You devil you!”
I tell him I think it’s odd that I can remember the mnemonic but only one bone, the scaphoid, which is represented by the first word of the mnemonic. And I tell him about the biology prof’s equation of poetry with nonsense. He is appropriately indignant.
“See this?” he says. He wags his finger in my face. “This is how I use my wrist to respond to your biology prof. Who cares what the wrist bones are called! Now, say it again, the mnemonic.” I say it again. He laughs. “That scans nicely. After the initial monosyllable it’s trochaic. Say again.”
Some lovers try positions that they cannot handle.
“You know why you remember that?” he says. “Because it’s poetry.”
Ron Healy lives in the woods near Sleeping Bear Dunes (Empire, Michigan, USA) near Lake Michigan. He is retired, having worked at a variety of jobs ranging from pulpwood cutter to academic librarian, his last job. He discovered poetry as a child in the fifties, published in little magazines in the eighties, stopped submitting (but not writing) for several decades, recently started again, and has read poems in the last couple of years at (and was published by) Poets’ Night Out in Traverse City. He expects that this current writing and submitting phase will last the rest of his life. This particular piece of writing started as a poem but turned into a story.