Job Interview

           Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife
           He would have written sonnets all his life?
                          DON JUAN, III, 63-4

"Where do you see yourself five years from now?"
the eldest male member (or is "male member"
a redundancy?) of the committee
asked me. "Not here," I thought. A good thing I

speak fluent Fog. I craved that job like some
unappeasable, taunting woman.
What did Byron's friend Hobhouse say after
the wedding? "I felt as if I had buried

a friend." Each day I had that job I felt
the slack leash at my throat and thought what was
its other trick. Better to scorn the job than ask
what I had ever seen in it or think

what pious muck I'd ladled over
the committee. If they believed me, they
deserved me. As luck would have it, the job
lasted me almost but not quite five years.

William Matthews
Poetry
Volume CLXXI, Number 1
Eighty-Fifth Anniversary
Special Double Issue
October-November 1997

Copyright © 1997 by the Modern Poetry Association.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.