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David Kirby: Shorty Boudreaux
When I was six
my father came home from a business trip
with a leather satchel that had the initials CKS on it.
My father’s initials were TAK.
He was in a department store
and a clerk said that CKS ordered the satchel but never picked it up
so my father could have it for half price.
Who’s CKS, I said,
and my father didn’t know,
only that the clerk said he was Chinese.
I didn’t want my father to have that satchel.
I didn’t want my father to be Chinese!
What would that make me.
In those days Mr. Shorty Boudreaux
came to our house to work on my dad’s Buick.
He really was short.
He’d get on a box and disappear under the hood
and jump down half an hour later,
grinning and wiping his hands on a rag,
and ask me about school.
Once I asked my father
what Mr. Shorty Boudreaux’s real name was
and he said, “I don’t know, Shorty?”
Poet, critic, and scholar David Kirby grew up on a farm in southern Louisiana. Since 1969 he has taught at Florida State University, where he has received several teaching awards. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, poet Barbara Hamby. His many books include Help Me, Information (LSU, 2021).
Poem copyright 2024 David Kirby. All rights reserved.
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It’s good to read a poem that makes one smile. Thanks.
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I agree, Luray. In this difficult time, we need to keep a sense of humor.
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So David Kirby. A whole world and a smile in a few lines. Brilliant!
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I agree. David is able to create a distinct character in just a short space.
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I SO agree with you, Rosemary! Bravo, David!
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David Kirby’s poem may be a shorty, but stands long on implications. Humor softens the feel of the insights, but they still connect.
By happenstance, I’m reading Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead. It too is partly about how identities are created by names others give us, or how we work to transcend those identities. Demon and Shorty also focus on broader stereotypes. During my youth in Houston, TX, the name Boudreaux had markings of bayou Cajun culture, which in my early days, was not a high end identity for us “sofistikated” Texan youth to emulate. Shorty Boudreaux would have been a double insult for any of us boys to be called.
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I grew up in Houston as well, Jim. My family had one foot in the redneck evangelical culture and one foot in the new sophistication wealth was bringing.
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I just read yesterday in Demon Copperhead how the red neck expression derived from the red bandanas that striking coal miners wore to designate they were union members back in earlier Appalachia. How expressions change their meaning.
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Thanks, Jim. I didn’t know that.
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