“Taking Notes” and “Mimosa” by Bonnie Proudfoot

    (after Ellen Bass, “What Did I Love”)

After lights dimmed and the slide projector flashed
the underwater archaeology of ancient Greece and Crete,
murky Minoan masks of gold or bejeweled swords
from shipwrecks off the coast of Spain, though I fought it, 
I dozed until the classroom lights came back on. Other times, 
when the prof had earnest eyebrows or hands that fussed, 
a cigarette burning to a nub while he talked, ashes falling, 
I drew it all in my spiral-bound notebooks instead of taking notes. 
I love how my college notebooks might as well be 
sketchbooks, Shakespeare prof, poet, fiction writer, 
especially education profs who droned on
about objectives and outcomes, and sometimes 
other students, who maybe nodded off 
with their heads resting on their wrists, 
who didn’t glimpse me staring, sketching them.  

That’s why I forgive every student who sleeps 
during class, and I love the ones who doodle or draw, 
who possibly never catch any of the concepts
I chalk onto blackboards, the diagrams of rising action, 
climax, denouement, resolution, and after all, 
these really aren’t graphs of the stories I assign, 
it’s my life, tension rising as papers are due back, 
miles of red ink needing to be spilled, or faculty break 
room where dramas are never resolved, union negotiations, 
or teaching evaluations -- each episode a little arc 
rising or falling action, climax, anti-climax. 

And when I look out over the classroom, to check
whether the wisdom I dispense has been sinking in, 
my eyes are most often caught by the doodlers, the ones 
who likely begin by placing that graph on their paper, 
then become swept into embellishment, dots, loops, 
swirls, lines, or the ones who hide behind the guise
of taking notes, but are shading, glancing, shading, 
drawing me. Those students, the glow bright 
above their bowed heads. I love them the most. 

Wind blows down the avenue, summer 
in Queens, everyone’s windows open
and you can catch the Yankee game
from every taxi or idling car at a traffic light,
truck exhaust mixes with asphalt, diesel from buses, 
the smell says pizza from noon to midnight,
but for some reason, in front of my building 
something a little rank like soaked gym socks, 
the spent flowers from a mimosa, which inconveniently
stick onto every parked car’s hood, mansard roof, or
windshield wipers. Leggy tree, straining toward 
the sun between buildings, in a small square
of dirt cut out of the concrete sidewalk, 
marked by dogs, backed into by inept parkers, 
scrawny limbs and barkless naked branches. 
Back in July, festooned by pink and white flowers
like little ruffled parasols in a cocktail, it was
as out of place as a movie set prop, a neon
beach umbrella without a beach in sight. 
Oh, mimosa. If I ever am so lucky to have a tree, 
I used to think, way before I ever had a tree
or drank a mimosa, I would never have one 
as skanky as a slit-thigh prom dress, promising 
way too much, with touch-me-not leaves that clamp 
together when brushed or patted. Not me. 
In those days, everything was already impossibly clamped 
to everything else. I had no idea who I wanted to be, 
but I know what it felt like, moment by moment, to be 
surrounded by everything galling. Maybe some other 
girl looked out over the fire escape while waiting for a GTO 
to double park with its flashers on, radio blasting 
“Can’t take my eyes off you,” maybe someone 
(say my mom) on a neighborhood beautification committee 
would plant a mimosa and hope the block, for one month
in summer, would look like a fairy tale. But now 
it’s almost September. School’s back in session. The pennant
race is heating up. Across the street at Luigi’s, 
Luigi is dripping sweat and his transom fan blows
hot cheese and tomato sauce out onto the block. 
Poor tree, hungry for light, hungry for a tropical breeze,
drips her faded droopy flowers onto every hubcap
and into every storm drain. She can’t wait to get away, 
but she’s a little too desperate to show it.

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