59 School poems

I passed by the school where I studied as a boy and said in my heart: here I learned certain things and didn't learn others. All my life I have loved in vain the things I didn't learn. I am filled with knowledge, I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge, the shape of its leaves, the function of its root system, its pests and parasites. I'm an expert on the botany of good and evil, I'm still studying it, I'll go on studying till the day I die. I stood near the school building and looked in. This is the room where we sat and learned. The windows of a classroom always open to the future, but in our innocence we thought it was only landscape we were seeing from the window. The schoolyard was narrow, paved with large stones. I remember the brief tumult of the two of us near the rickety steps, the tumult that was the beginning of a first great love. Now it outlives us, as if in a museum, like everything else in Jerusalem.

All day they stream past, petitioners for understanding, accolade, critique. I read them all, a vast anthology of jumbled genres on a common theme: affliction. So I parse, interpret, scan. I graph dysrhythmias, dysmetrias; I eavesdrop on caesuras for unsaid murmurs, gallops, rubs, snaps, flutters, clicks. The perils of misreading harrow me— beware the treacheries of metaphor!— the elephant that squats upon a chest is not a burning heart or waterbrash. Just take the imagists. Their heads explode. St Elmo's fire flashdances on their limbs. They float, they swim. Knives twist within their flesh. They're ball-and-chained by lead, filled with concrete. Butterflies inhabit them. Their pipes are wrong, and clogged. Their systems freeze and crash. Invaded, they resist; defenses fail. What they need, they think, is you to flush it out of them, whatever it is, doc. The formalists present minutiae, in alphabetical enjambed iambs— pentameter's ten digits, five lub-dubs— from acne, backpain, catarrh, dandruff, eye- strain, flatfoot, gas pains, hangnail, itchiness, the jitters, kinks, lethargies, migraines, nose- bleeds, obstipation, panics, queasy retch- ings, styes and tremors, ulcers, vertigo, to wandering womb, xerosis, yaws and zits. Free versers, on the other hand, wax Walt Whitmanic: their barbaric yawps celebrate and sing incantatory songs of themselves, songs of the breath as it wheezes and rales through them, the short breath and long breath, the breath that is moist or dry, songs of the blood, the thick- and thinness of it, its heat, its turbulence, songs of the gut, its rippling coils, the dark burden of its secret indulgences, songs of the muscled limb, inflamed with toil or the languid thrash of love. Didacticists, of course, will always add their theories of omission or commission: slept in a draft, got their feet wet, caught a chill, forgot their overshoes and oversoul, ate too little roughage, too much ham, should have pumped less iron or pumped more, Mea culpa, meus morbus they intone, certain you'll absolve them back to health. Narrativists enshrine a fleeting pain within an epic of chronology I woke at six—I'm a morning person— brushed my teeth, ate oatmeal with a pat of low-fat margarine, the kind that has the dancing turkey on the tub, on sale for .99 at Johnnie's , by the time you tune back in it's afternoon, the pain has come and gone; they're vacuuming the rug, the doorbell rings, the kettle's whistling, you try to interrupt— where did you say that pain was? —loquacity steamrolls on through supper, TV, bedtime, dreams, alarm clock going off at six. Try Tylenol , you say, your fingers crossed. Call if it's worse. Then there's the avant garde. The cutting edge. The text Munchausens off the sizzling page. Hypoglossalalia muscles in, between John Cagey silences, the din and Sturm of wild unsound, unsense. O, there are stranger dysphasias, Wernicke, than are dreamt of in your neurologies, mutant L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Es that cacophone far off the beaten geographic tongue, where elephants explode and overshoes fibrillate with longing—El Dorado, Shangri-la, Eden, Heaven, Hell—you name it, it's yours. And that's, of course, the joke. You nod. You say, "I understand." You really don't.

For my students This is for the boys whose bedrooms are in the basement, who press creases into jeans, who carve their names in pavement, the girls whose names are ancient, ancestry is sacred, the Aztec and the Mayan gods abuela used to pray with This is for the dangerous words hiding in the pages of composition notes, holy books, and Sanskrit This is for the patients who wait for medication, for the mothers microwaving beans and rice at day’s end This is for the marching bands and girls at quinceañeras, the skaters and the writers whose moms are eloteras, laughing “Cops don’t scare us, we sag so elders fear us We will rewrite our textbooks in our own language if you dare us” This is for the Sarahs, the Angelicas, and Shawns, the Beatrices, Paolas, Danielas, and the dawns we scribble sunlight in the margins of horizons with our songs, for all the voices tangled with the silence on our tongues Rivals in the parks, fireworks at dark, tired shirts that sweat your scent on hangers in the closet For the boys who fix the faucet while their sister fixes coffee ’cause mommy had to leave for work at 6 AM and laundry isn’t folded yet: you don’t have to hold your breath You don’t have to behave: stage your own rebellion, paint canvases with rage and religion and prayers for pilgrims sleeping in the train cars at the border and their children Filibust the Senate and bust markers on the Pink Line, stain the prosecution’s case and force the judge to resign, force the crowd the rewind the lyrics you invented Speak away the limits to heights of your existence Be a witness, be a record, be a testament, a triumph Set your poems flying in the glitter of the planets Feed open mouths with truth, the truth is we are famished The Universe is starving for the symphonies you play Clarinets and thunder and the syllables you say are the instruments: you are infinite. Stretch your hands to heaven Let your throat throttle the rhythms of all your fallen brethren Your legacy is present, your history is now You are the tenth degree of sound You are the nephews of the sky You are the bass line and the hi-hat and the snare drum and the cry of red Septembers. You’re the architects of winter You are the builders of the roads that you’re told you don’t remember          You are the builders of the roads that you’re told you don’t remember       You are the builders of the roads that you’re told you don’t remember Cast poems in the river and tell them you remember Skate City Hall to splinters and tell them you remember Send diamonds to your islands and tell them you remember Find your God inside your mirror and tell Her you remember

I Students, look at this table And now when you see a man six feet tall You can call him a fathom. Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun And the alphabet is full of blood And when you knock upon a sentence in the Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags Likewise, hello and goodbye. II Nick Algiers is my student And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide And so, I am the one in front of him And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed. Likewise the distance between us then Is the knife that is not marriage. III Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess Like making love or writing a poem Or drinking wine on a tropical island With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night. I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous. And in dreaming myself upon the moon I have made the moon my home and no one Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips. And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is That I will never win.

For Allison Hogge, in memory of Brian Wilkie I was a math major—fond of all things rational. It was the first day of my first poetry class. The prof, with the air of a priest at Latin mass, told us that we could “make great poetry personal,” could own it, since poetry we memorize sings inside us always. By way of illustration he began reciting Shelley with real passion, but stopped at “Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”— because, with that last plosive, his top denture popped from his mouth and bounced off an empty chair. He blinked, then offered, as postscript to his lecture, a promise so splendid it made me give up math: “More thingth like that will happen in thith clath.”

The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands When imperceptive hands, Feeling, have gone astray. It is what one should say. Few minds will come to this. The poet’s only bliss Is in cold certitude— Laurel, archaic, rude.

For 1995 It was the dead center of summer, & anyone but us would’ve been outside hours ago, flailing like a system of larks against the hydrant’s icy spray. But a girl had her orders, & to disobey our mother was, in a sense, to invite one’s own destruction, cause to pray that a god of mercy might strike first. So we lay, still as stars on the living room floor, poring over algorithms: divisors & dividends,quotient the first synonym for resolution I ever learned, & would later come to love for its sound alone, how it reminded me, even then, of words like quantum&quotation mark, both ways of saying nothing means what you think it means all the time. The observable universe hides behind its smooth obsidian dress, & all we can do is grasp at it in myths & figures, see what sticks, give all our best language to the void. What dark irony, these coy, child philosophers, theorizing how things break from the floor of a house where everything is more or less in flux, indeterminate as the color of the blood in a body. Or the speed at which I learned to obliterate the distance between myself & any given boy on the block, the optimal angle of the swing most likely to drop another kid cold in front of his crew, to square up, square off, & this too was a kind of education, the way my sister held both fists semi-adjacent, each an inch or so from her switchblade eyes, showed me the stance you take when the math doesn’t quite shake out, so it’s just you & the unknowns & the unknowns never win.

I use a trick to teach students how to avoid passive voice. Circle the verbs. Imagine inserting “by zombies” after each one. Have the words been claimed by the flesh-hungry undead? If so, passive voice. I wonder if these sixth graders will recollect, on summer vacation, as they stretch their legs on the way home from Yellowstone or Yosemite and the byway’s historical marker beckons them to the site of an Indian village— Where trouble was brewing. Where,after further hostilities, the army was directed to enter. Where the village was razed after the skirmish occurred. Where most were women and children. Riveted bramble of passive verbs etched in wood— stripped hands breaking up from the dry ground to pinch the meat of their young red tongues.

Today I managed something that I’ve never done before. I turned in this week’s spelling quiz and got a perfect score. Although my score was perfect, it appears I’m not too bright. I got a perfect zero— not a single answer right.

I remember the first day, how I looked down, hoping you wouldn't see me, and when I glanced up, I saw your smile shining like a soft light from deep inside you. “I'm listening,” you encourage us. “Come on! Join our conversation, let us hear your neon certainties, thorny doubts, tangled angers,” but for weeks I hid inside. I read and reread your notes praising my writing, and you whispered, “We need you and your stories and questions that like a fresh path will take us to new vistas.” Slowly, your faith grew into my courage and for you— instead of handing you a note or apple or flowers— I raised my hand. I carry your smile and faith inside like I carry my dog's face, my sister's laugh, creamy melodies, the softness of sunrise, steady blessings of stars, autumn smell of gingerbread, the security of a sweater on a chilly day.