Credit, Check, and: Correspondence, Natural Bridge

Credit, Check

In a world of what and who you know, thyself
is not a very lucrative answer. Thus, résumé.
Thus, CV. Thus reference and recommendation,
thus glowing blurbs on an otherwise banal book.
Oh, those high school English honors every year
are little help here, at my unremarkable job,
and Latin, the oldest, most stolen office supply,
rusts in my ROM while I RAM through another day.
Here credit spawns belief - it's backward etymology -
my work and my work on different shifts, drifting job
to job. And poetry, like any hard boss, upbraids me,
suspects me of moonlighting and strings me along
with praise not pay. Good work tonight.
You're a credit to this organization.

Correspondence, Natural Bridge

What I remember were his initials carved in stone
twenty feet off the creek, father of the country, look,
he signed for it. Back in Charlottesville, I worked for
the Washington Papers, a second job at grad-student wages,
squinting into microfiche at the elegant cursives of
a hundred dead, decorous hands. George's strokes
were gracious, calm, not without quirks - a casual small w
which passed for an n ("My Fellon Citizens," I smirked).
Why not make up the past? - they made it up as they went.
Among historians I was the sham, misleading and misled
as a Spring forgery. The mistake fakes make is how
hands change: the edgy early years; an older flow;
a forger is many men well, to be even one. George
revised. First-hand another lie most cannot tell.