Anecdote
The first year, students would come up to me
between class while we all stood outside
the little kindergarten that had been converted
into the English faculty in the hinterlands
of the former Soviet Union and say, Mr. Kurt,
tell us please an anecdote. Life until then
hadn’t lent itself to Chekhov, let alone Turgenev
or Tolstoy, but I’d lived a slew of anecdotes.
The students would lean in close and laugh
at the end, glancing at one another, one maybe
balling his hand in a fist and clipping a neighbor
on the shoulder, before they would thank me
and shuffle back through unlit halls painted
with ducks and dancing bears to their next class.
My second and final year, after living some more,
I came to understand when they said anecdote
they’d been taught the word meant joke,
and when asked I shook my head and told them
sorry, I didn’t know any anecdotes anymore.
I always had a poor memory for such things.
Kurt Olsson has published two collections of poetry. His most recent, Burning Down Disneyland, won Gunpowder Press’s Barry Spacks Prize. A third collection, The Unnumbered Anniversaries, is due out from Fernwood Press later this year.
