Monday's Poetry: "Drill"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

Several days ago while I was driving my ancient Saturn Vue north on Porter Wagoner Boulevard (a main thoroughfare in West Plains, Missouri), I pulled up to a stoplight just after it had turned red.  Suddenly the passenger door on the car in the other lane opened and a teenage girl jumped out.  She ran around the car in front of the one in which she had been a passenger, and then back around her own car before opening the door and jumping in.  When the light turned green, she and her driver drove off as though nothing had happened.

And I knew, based on knowledge that I had acquired during my prolonged wasted youth, that I had just witnessed a modified version of a Chinese Fire Drill.  (And yes, I realize that terminology is politically incorrect on a couple of levels, but it is still the most commonly used label for this particular type of road shenanigans.)

The standard Chinese Fire Drill back in the day involved one person in the car - sometimes specifically the driver - suddenly calling "Chinese Fire Drill!" at a stoplight, and then everyone quickly exiting the vehicle and running around it in a complete circle and getting back into their proper seating arrangement.  You failed the drill if the light changed before you were back in the car.

The Urban Dictionary describes a couple of variations to the standard drill.  One involves everyone jumping out of the car, running around the stopped vehicle, and then getting back in - in a different arrangement.  The other has two cars working in tandem.  When they get lucky and hit a stoplight, everyone jumps out of both cars and then rushes to get in the one in which they had not been riding.

The primary object of this silly sport is to shock people in the other cars.  But the old coot puttering down Porter Wagoner Boulevard wasn't shocked - he's been around!

(Warnings:  Exiting any vehicle in a traffic situation is dumb and dangerous - and should never be attempted while the vehicle is in gear or has the engine running.)

Today's poem, "Drill" is by Michael Collier and is featured in his 1995 collection entitled The Neighbor by the University of Chicago Press.  The poem describes a fire drill and an atomic attack drill in a classroom at a parochial school sometime in the 1950s or 1960s.  And the scenes - particularly the one of children hiding under their desks to escape death and destruction by an atomic bomb, bought back memories to this aging typist.

I particularly liked the image of the nun struggling to get out from under her desk!

This is actually how it was, way back when:


Drill
by Michael Collier

    When the fire bell rang its two short, one long   

     electric signal, the boys closest to the wall   

     of windows had to raise the blinds and close   

     the sashes, and then join the last of our line   

     as it snaked out the classroom onto the field   

     of asphalt where we stood, grade-by-grade,

     until the principal appeared with her gold Timex.

     We learned early that catastrophe must always   

     be attended in silence, that death prefers us   

     orderly and ordered, and that rules will save us   

     from the chaos of our fear, so that even   

     if we die, we die together, which was the calm   

     almost consoling thought I had each time

     the yellow C.D. siren wailed and we would tuck   

     ourselves beneath our sturdy desktops.

     Eyes averted from the windows,

     we’d wait for the drill to pass or until

     the nun’s rosary no longer clicked and we could hear   

     her struggling to free herself from the leg-well   

     of her desk, and then her call for us to rise   

     and, like herself, brush off the dust gathered   

     on our clothes. And then the lessons resumed.   

     No thought of how easily we interred ourselves,

     though at home each would dream the mushroom cloud,   

     the white cap of apocalypse whose funnel stem   

     sucked glass from windows, air from lungs,   

     and made all these rehearsals the sad and hollow   

     gestures that they were, for we knew it in our bones   

     that we would die, curled in a last defense—

     head on knees, arms locked around legs—

     the way I’ve seen it since in nursing homes

     and hospices: forms bedsheets can’t hide,   

     as if in death the body takes on the soul’s   

     compact shape, acrobatic, posed to tumble free   

     of the desktop or bed and join the expanse   

     and wide scatter of debris.