Donald Wheelock

From Third to First Person

Reviewing the years past, when does he see
the silent switch from third to first person?
Still there, the boy surrounded by the swarm
of post-war babies, five or six years old,
thirty to a room, all learning how
to read, yet seen, not on a par with Spot,
but from some distant lens above the room,
the kid he was, a theme for idle study.
   And from that vantage point the subject stays,
an adolescent in a car, his props:
the girl, the cigarette, the All-State Band,
the disciplines a college will demand,
reduced to mere autobiography.
   And still he sees the kid — he’s struggling there,
observed by a later version of himself —
in ceiling shots — college labs and classrooms,
practice rooms, and boring summer jobs.
   And then infatuations, marriage, children;
at last, a semblance of adulthood, shot,
still, from the distance of a lens that sees
the world from corners of regret and loss —
why can’t this man, his years now decimated,
wise up and sort the whole thing out? 
   He settles in. You see him there among
the colleagues of his day. Alone he stands
before a class, uncertain in these years,
a composer and a lesser light — why bother?—
the masterpieces — all — have now been written…
Why does the man persist? — and yet he writes,
amazed, with all the rest, what can be done
with just 12 notes, if not today…by him…
And still he flails away, on a box onstage,
his other voice a serenade, a song,
a sacrifice portrayed.
                        The classrooms,
the offices are vague. In the last of them
he sees himself below — he’s writing there —
he feels this person as myself, he is —
I am the latest of my written words.

Donald Wheelock, a composer and retired college teacher, is the author of two full-length books of poetry: It’s Hard Enough to Fly and With Nothing but a Nod. He lives in Whately, Massachusetts.