An enthusiastic group of talented poets started off the New Year at Café Espresso on a cold, but clear night. Anna Birch and Chris Volpe, the evening’s featured readers, read lovely, thoughtful poems about some of poetry’s eternal subjects: memory, family, childhood, love, marriage.

During the Open Mic portion of the evening, Gerry Duffy read this poem, which recalls his school days in Northern England:

Georgraphy Master

Before the class began and our master entered

the geography room, we’d already found a way,

when his hometown rugby team had lost, to taunt him

by chalking up the score on the blackboard.

A black-robed lay teacher of the earth’s wide skin,

he didn’t mind our jibes, rarely caned our fingertips.

A small area behind our desks, a work table

with rubber rollers, ink and pads, where we

ink-rolled paper maps for every far continent.

We printed the Great Lakes, the long ribbon of

the Mississippi River. I dreamed of cities, Chicago,

Minneapolis, Cincinnati, names with sounds

that belonged in some foreign opera.

He taught us language to conjure bold topographies:

chalk escarpments, cuspate forelands, submergent

coastlines, pebble spits, and long shore drift.

Years before I ever crossed Indiana’s summer fields

I crudely mapped the corn belt and saw its rising heat,

already part of my imaginary America.

– Gerald Duffy

With rich language and tangible details, the poem charts the dream – a vision of the future – a teacher fostered in one of his students, many years before the distant landscape was to be experienced. What delicious words on the tongue: “chalk escarpments, cuspate forelands, submergent coastlines, pebble spits” – words as delicious and exotic to us as the names of American cities: “Chicago, Minneapolis, Cincinnati” were to a young boy in Yorkshire.

In the course of the poem we travel in both time and space with the narrator, from the classroom of a favorite teacher where students ink-rolled “paper maps for every far continent,” to the “rising heat” of an Indiana cornfield across the ocean years later. We share in the pleasure of naming the places and features of “the earth’s wide skin” and in recognizing the power of language to generate dreams.

– Harvey Shepard

(hshepard@gmail.com)

“Geography Master” copyright 2006 by Gerald Duffy. Gerry was born and grew up in Northern England. He came to the United States in 1975 and later studied English literature and journalism at UNH. He works as a technical editor and lives in Portsmouth with his wife and son.