David Kirby: The Way I See It

The most important task was to serve as a sort of official best friend, requiring discretion, an ear for gossip, and a careful eye on the queen’s needs and wants.
— from the obituary of Virginia Ogilvy, lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II

~

Sounds like a good one, as jobs go. How do you get it, though?
Ogilvy’s obit says she came “from immense wealth,” which helps,
since the position comes with neither salary nor benefits. I wonder

what kind of boss the queen was. The person my students hate
most at their jobs is not the manager but the assistant manager.
He’s the hit man: while the manager is on the phone to corporate,

the assistant manager is checking your time card, noticing how long
you take for lunch, making sure you’re not working one of those
word-search puzzles where you look at a pageful of random letters

and circle the hidden words instead of folding clothes customers
have left in the changing rooms, filling in one spreadsheet after
another, tidying shelves from which jars of peanut butter and bottles

of ketchup have been removed either deliberately or by accident—
cleanup on aisle seven! Once I worked on a road crew, and one
of the guys went to the woods so often to relieve himself that

the boss limited him to four number ones per day and two number twos.
Another day, I got a job in a New York City car wash and didn’t even
make it to lunchtime when the boss there fired me after I yanked

a woman’s skirt off with one of those that big sucky vacuum hoses,
just pulled a roll of bills out, handed me a couple, told me
to get the fuck out of there, can’t blame him for that. Can’t blame

the guy in line in front of me at CVS this morning who said
The way I see it, I got to pay the bills some kinda way.
I wonder if our bosses have any idea how much time we spend

thinking about them. My friend Silvia can’t sleep because
she can’t remember the name of her boss from twenty years ago.
There’s so much more to think about these days—global warning,

school shootings, attempted coups—and there’s Silvia, staring
at the ceiling, her lips moving slowly as she silently says Williams?
O’Shaughnessy? Goldberg? And even if she recalls his last name,

~~

Copyright 2025 David Kirby

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He has received many honors for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His many books include The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983–2023 (LSU, 2024).