by Ralph James Savarese

Poznan, 1990. Adam Mickiewicz University.
I’m sitting on the spoken language assessment
committee for students who have cultivated
an American accent. One mangled word,

and they drop you from this elite program.
It’s as if Stalin or Jaruzelski were living
inside a phoneme—picture tanks in your mouth.
Our very best student is flying through the exam

when he stumbles on the word “focus,”
pronouncing it “fuhkuhs.” The head
of the committee, a distinguished philologist,
announces smugly, “You fail.” “Wait a minute,”

I interject. “In Northern Vermont there’s
an alternative pronunciation of the word.”
Seeking my wife’s confirmation—she, too,
is on the committee—I ask rhetorically,

“Don’t Vermonters always say, ‘It’s time to fuhkuhs?’”
“Oh, yes,” she replies without skipping a beat.
“When facing a problem, they will look skyward
and proclaim, “Time to fuhkuhs.'” And then I add,

at which point she kicks me under the table,
“Often in bed, they will utter a prayer to Cupid:
‘It’s time to fuhkuhs.'” The philologist knows
we’re full of duhng, yet he must, by law, defer

to the native speakers. Time to fuhkuhs—
unless we fuhk them. That young man is
now a professor of English at a university
in Southern Poland. How funny that his entire

career hinged on the long “o” of a word
whose meaning can be traced back to “hearth”
or “fireplace,” as if human warmth and
knowledge born of the senses went together.