Sean Wayman: ‘The Miracle of the Thumbtack’

The Miracle of the Thumbtack

The bricks sit heavily atop each other.
The desks form rows, with chairs set beneath.
The carpet’s outspread in a smother
of green- that of broccoli, over-boiled.
The view’s even glummer: a quadrangle walled
with unpatterned concrete. Eight twenty-five:
the school year’s final headcount is called.
Seated, I wait for my class to arrive.

“Come inside and sit down,” I repeat,
addressing the war-thinned regiment
who’ve bothered coming at all today.
Stern of expression, I try to defeat
any mutinous notion of games or play.
The class bustles in: five students; all boys.
Averting my gaze, I mark the roll.
There’s twenty-one absences: a record toll.

Professing pity for those who remain,
I announce the suspension of ‘silent reading’.
In truth, I’m rather afraid of proceeding
with everyone seeming so disinclined.
But, of course, I’ve erred. It’s hard to refrain
from noisy pleasures unless you’re given
some work to do. So using 10-cent coins as pucks,
they start a game of table hockey. With clucks

of teacherly disapproval, I shush
the tournament’s mounting din. But their
playfulness isn’t so easy to crush.
A baseball cap is seized off a desk,
prompting tumultuous remonstrations.
I intervene with my teacher-burlesque,
scowling, purse-lipped, and muttering darkly.
They seem unfazed by my imprecations.

And so the students’ coins re-emerge.
I emptily threaten to seize them all,
thankfully prompting their swift withdrawal.
But then the class members’ eyes converge
on the cork board’s constellation of tacks.
They pluck out a few and set them spinning.
While some seem to do the parasol dance,
others dart off like a sidelong glance.

And now, onstage in all their glitter,
two, squat ballerinas pirouette.
But soon they’ve collapsed to a nervous titter,
their new routine not perfected yet.
I’m tempted out of my deep-creased annoyance
and actually start enjoying the show;
the twirling thumbtacks’ gilded flamboyance
sets the heavy-bricked classroom aglow.

Then right at this point, the bell supervenes.
Three of the boys are straight out the door.
Yet on Brendan’s desk, a thumbtack still spins,
providing the concert’s triumphant encore.
In seeming transcendence of time and place,
this brilliant performer keeps whirling on;
amazement extends beyond Brendan’s face,
much as the sky exceeds the horizon.

The tack spins so evenly, it seems to stand:
a gilt umbrella, planted in beach-sand.
Or else the thumbtack’s a dancer en pointe,
the second leg hidden behind the first;
like any miracle, it’s unrehearsed.
Debacle-accustomed, the three of us wait,
knowing that soon the thumbtack must fall.
But it somehow keeps to the vertical,

dismissing our gloom-laden expectations.
There isn’t even the slightest shiver,
no moment of doubt, no premonitory quiver;
the world of fast-moving fluctuations
has entered into a baffling abeyance.
Yet Jamie, who hovers by Brendan’s side,
appears to grow tired of these agile rotations.
The thumbtack’s failed to effect his conveyance

from dull-eyed routine to the gleaming sublime.
Scorning a gimmick that’s ceased to amuse him,
he knocks down the thumbtack, still in its prime.
“Aw, man!” says Brendan- despondent, bereft.
The look he shoots Jamie seems to accuse him
of crass irreligion and miracle theft.
Leaving the thumbtack, he traipses outside,
assuming the school day’s tremendous heft.

The very first bell of the school year rings,
bringing a prickling sense of unease,
then Brendan comes in with a gaze that swings,
as if it were slung from a circus trapeze.
I think of last year and wonder whether
(though neither of us could stay there in it)
he still remembers that perfect minute
when thumbtack and world both span together.

Sean Wayman