"Death & the Janitor" by Carl Boon

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present “Death & the Janitor” by Carl Boon.  A native Ohioan, Boon lives and works in Izmir, Turkey. His poems have appeared in dozens of magazines, most recently: Two Thirds North, Jet Fuel Review, Blast Furnace, and the Kentucky Review.

Death & the Janitor

Carl Boon

Remember the janitor,

overalled and bald. He must be dead

by now, his ’77 Pinto in pieces

across western Pennsylvania.

He had an unusual laugh,

the kind heard at funerals

where some aunt has died

unsuspiciously,

and they reckon her Oriental

sparrow-prints and recipe

for vegetarian lasagna.

How we lurked at corners,

giggled at his exasperations,

the misplaced mop, the pond

of vomit on the cafeteria’s edge,

the girls who twisted

their secret cigarettes

into the bathroom sink.

How clever we were

with our geometry books

and reports on planaria.

How marvelously

unlike him, who stumbled

December 8, 1989

and could barely stand up,

his lower lumbars receding

dangerously. It wasn’t the usual

cruelty of youth—it’s just that

we were never going to die,

and death itself

an abstraction, a man

in a beige Pinto

who’d arrived before us

and left far after: childless,

humorless, his fingernails

long and gray. This morning

I chased my daughter

through the playground’s pinwheels,

stopping twice: my left knee,

my side stitched with ache.

Poet’s Notes:  The janitor who worked in my middle school in the 1980s—I believe his name was Fred—cut a unique figure: part jokester, part uncle, part target of ridicule simply because he looked different than the students, teachers, and administrators. I suspect this is the case with many schools. This poem was born with a flash of his face and blue overalls, a memory, and then grew into a meditation on mortality and how children have no sense of their aging and dying. In the back of my mind—in that space where potential poems float and fade—I suppose I was also thinking about Williams’s “Death the Barber,” but only in the sense of title and a sort-of way in to thinking about the janitor.