Poetry by Ann Hostetler
Iconoclast

My grandfather Ezra painted a gigantic face
on the side of the shed when he cleaned his brushes,
stroking the weathered boards with leftover barn red,
till a man with a worldly mustache and pompadour

stared out across his half-section of Alberta wheat.
Ezra himself kept the Ordnung, shaved his mustache
and trimmed his beard, though he played baseball
on Saturdays. Nothing wrong with a little fun.

But a newcomer moved in down the road,
complained that his neighbor had painted a pinko
for everyone to see. Ezra shrugged, whitewashed the shed,
returned to the plow with a book in his hand.

No matter if the furrows are crooked, he said,
the seed will sprout just the same.
And Sundays after church he drew eagles
in the margins of his Bible.

(Click here for an imitation of this poem by David Neufeld.)


Resisting Geometry

The first time I saw my father defeated
he was leaving the only parent-teacher conference
he ever had concerning my academic failure,
his black raincoat drooping over one arm.
Settling his other arm over my shoulder,
he walked me to the car, told me about
his sixth-grade failure to master fractions.

How could I explain to him
it was the axioms themselves
I objected to, knowing that, like his whims,
I had to take them on faith.
Tested against experience
they appeared to be correct --
no two points could occupy the same space
at the same time; lines perfectly parallel
will never intersect; a staight line
is the shortest distance between two points.
But such self-evidence troubled me.

Imagining exceptions, I felt called
to test the axioms, to wage a battle
against givens, resisting at the root.
When the boy circled Mr. Oelkers
at the blackboard, arguing logic,
I sat at the back of the room
drawing shapes that defied these laws.

It was only in the spring, sprawled out
in front of the stereo, listening to James Taylor
and embroidering the margins of my geometry book
with blue ball-point pen, that I discovered
what was at stake for me was the axiomatic quality
of reasoning itself, the ways in which our assumptions
construct reality, become paradigms
that organize our vision.

I realized that no one else took geometry
as seriously as I did -- at least no one
who was failing, that is -- and that
in order to get on with life
I would have to get beyond axioms,
memorize theorems, prove hypotheses.

This was not art, where my doodles
might have some eccentric meaning.
This was a game with rules
and if I put aside my distrust of logic
long enough, I could learn to play.
But there was no longer time
to be good at it, only time to garner
a hard-won D.

(Click here for an interpretation of this poem by Greg Yoder.)


All poems posted with permission from the author.
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