A loud knocking as something 

Comes a rapping

A tapping

Upon our pine door

The door painted 

In chipped blue-green enamel 

The color of a dentist basin

The rap-a-tapping

Disturbing us in our brief moment of private solitude

From our strange and inconsolable discontentment

And a strange round headed girl

With glasses pokes her head in our entryway

From beyond the ever-twilight subterranean corridor

She speaks with broken and beleaguered English

And introduces herself while she mangles her English nouns

And munches upon prepositional phrases

Mixing her adjectives and adverbs

In a strange Chinese concoction

And thus was our first introduction

To the wonderful Miss Julie N Forma Tion

And she has one afternoon an exciting article to show me

About the giant radioactive rats of Chernobyl

Who wiped out a scientific team

And ate the wheels of their car

And she showed me the doctored photograph

As I asked her to cite the sources for the information

And Miss Julie N Forma Tion

She has a reputation among the other girls of her class

For speaking in English in her dreams

And for being very friendly with the Public Relations People

And, perhaps, possibly, even informing on her fellow students

Whom she does not like very much

And teachers alike

Miss Julie N Forma Tion

Is the center of every photograph she shows me

Was treated somewhat cruelly by her father

As she was made to kneel on a cold hard floor

For hours on end

But she doesn't open her book in class

And comes chronically late

And she expects to be treated specially

By her new American teacher

To help her tutor for her BEC exams

I found I could not oblige her in all her expectations

And it was some weeks later

In our journalism class

That the Chernobyl rats had come alive

Once again

As an historical fact confessed to by all the class

A truth somewhat larger than real life

Arisen from the dead

Chinese style

The Great Wall Revisited

Trails in the Snow

1991-1993