In second grade I felt about him, and three other boys, quite equally, in a way the Church identified, later, for me as lust. He was short and square, chubby in the thigh, with butter-colored hair. But none of this explains why I put my vanilla ice-cream sandwich in his pencil box which was a work of art, its cardboard covered with green paper stamped so that it looked like Mother's tooled leather address book. Its little drawers housed rows of pencils in all worldly colors. My ice-cream oozed through levels of his cardboard, congealing pencils in its sweet, pale soup, and when the teacher, whose name I've forgotten asked, "Who did this?" I erupted into tears, fled to the girls' room and had to be scolded out of a locked stall to run a gauntlet of giggles. Apologies were futile. He knew I was crazy and kept out of reach right through high school. Even now, perhaps, there's a man, middle-aged in his gray, three-piece suit, who suffers from pencil-box trauma. What was I attempting to say in blundering, fledgling symbolism? You melt me? I want to melt you? Was I a seven-year-old pencil-box fetishist or an early case of role reversal? I've never told an analyst about this, but saved it all these years for you, who, since you did that bizarre thing during nap time or in the supply closet or under the hedge during recess, also relive the inexplicable in middle age. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...PRO PATRIA MORI by THOMAS MOORE UNDERWOODS: BOOK 1: 38 by ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON BROWN OF OSSAWATOMIE [DECEMBER 2, 1859] by JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH MAY DAY by ADELAIDE A. ANDREWS THE DAUGHTER OF THE BLIND by ANNE M. F. ANNAN PEARLS OF THE FAITH: 59. AL-MUBDI by EDWIN ARNOLD |