PoMo2013 - Poem 23- "Fifth Grade"

Fifth Grade

  If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

                                                                     - David Foster Wallace

 

When I was in elementary school,
I got A+’s in Handwriting.
In fifth grade, the only student
who came close to me in that subject
was a boy named Barry.
I don't know
what happened
to Barry and his handwriting

but mine led me
to hours of anguish.
 

I’d get all the way to the end of a page

without making a mistake

and then

on the last line

if my cursive wasn’t just right

and if an erasure
threatened
to expose my imperfections
I'd have to re-start.

 

My sister said I made her crazy
watching me
re-write
letters
to my 5^th grade-pen pal.

And you know the envelopes
had to be perfect too (but that's
another story).

For class, I wrote my stories

over and over again
and I wrote with a #3 pencil,
as if I didn’t want anybody
to see what I was writing.

Mother kept telling me
to use #2 pencils,
but the print

didn’t look as pretty

on the page.

To make a long story short:

I got A+ in Handwriting,
but I didn’t turn
my work in
on time.

This led people to think I was slow.
- Esther Altshul Helfgott
4/23/13