59 School poems

Drawn by ceremonial obligation up from sleep I woke and stepped into the borrowed black robes all ghost bureaucrats trained to redirect dreaming pretend we do not like to wear. I drove my black car to the stadium to sit on stage and be watched watching young expectant spirits one by one with dread certainty pass before me, clouded in their names. Then listened to no one in their speeches say you’re welcome for allowing us not to tell you it’s already too late to learn anything or defend whatever accidental instrument in us causes all these useless thoughts. Like if you walked for hours through the vast black avenues of those server farms all of us with our endless attention built, you could almost feel the same peaceful disinterest as when your parents talking and smoking raised their heads for a moment to smile and tell you go back upstairs and read the book you love about myths that explain weather and death. Now it is almost June and they are finally the children they always were. So more precise than anyone has ever had to be, go forget everything we told you so you can fix what we kept destroying by calling the future.

On Tuesday on the way to Tween Time Alison is all bubbly with guess-whos and guess-whats. “Guess who really stole Mrs. Bagwell's ring?” “Guess what Mrs. Bagwell is doing now?” “Guess what you and I are going to do this Friday?” I hold my hand up. “Whoa! One guess at a time, please.”

I don’t like doing homework, I know that it will bore me. But now I am much happier ’Cause Freddie does it for me! He greets me at the door each day When I come home from school. He just can’t wait to read my books— I think that’s pretty cool! I give him all my homework, Like history and math. And when he’s done I give him A nice warm bubble bath! My grades are so much better now, Which makes my parents glad. Freddie is the smartest dog That I have ever had!

When we go out into the fields of learning We go by a rough route Marked by colossal statues, Frankenstein's Monsters, AMPAC and the 704, AARDVARK, and deoxyribonucleic acid. They guard the way. Headless they nod, wink eyeless, Thoughtless compute, not heartless, For they figure us, they figure Our next turning. They are reading the book to be written. As we start out At first daylight into the fields, they are saying, Starting out. In every sage leaf is contained a toad Infinitely small. Carbonized grains of wheat unearthed From the seventh millennium B.C. town of Jarmo In the Tigris-Euphrates basin Match the grains of three kinds of wheat still extant, Two wild, one found only in cultivation. The separate grains Were parched and eaten, Or soaked into gruel, yeasted, fermented. Took to the idea of bread, Ceres, while you were gone. Wind whistles in the smokey thatch, Oven browns its lifted loaf, And in the spring the nourished seeds, Hybrid with wild grass, Easily open in a hundred days, And seeded fruits, compact and dry, Store well together. They make the straw for beds, They ask the caring hand to sow, the resting foot To stay, to court the seasons. Basil: hatred: king over pain. What did you do on the last day of day camp? First we did games, running around and playing. Then we did crafts, making things. Then we did nature, what goes on and on. Eventually a number Of boys have got big enough Through all the hazards of drag-racing, theft, and probation, To start for junior college, two transfers away, Mysterious as Loch Ness. While of grandmothers a number Have stooping arrived to seventy or eighty And wave the boys on, shaking With more absentminded merriment than they have mustered In half a century. King Henry the Eighth consumed many daisies In an attempt to rid himself of ulcers. Algebra written across a blackboard hurts As a tight shoe hurts; it can't be walked in. Music, a song score, hurts, How far lies one note from another? Graft hurts, its systems of exploitation In cold continuance. Argosies of design, fashions to which the keys Rest restlessly in an Egyptian tomb. In every sage leaf is contained a toad Infinitely small.

The bus steps are high, but William clambers up gamely. Doors shut. He peers out a print-marked window. From the street corner, I wave, wistful as a soldier’s bride as his bus pulls away and turns a corner. At noon the yellow bus returns him to the same place where I’m standing again. He thinks I stood there all day, waiting in his absence. When he finds out I left to play tennis, his forehead crumples like paper in a wastebasket. Now he knows I can move on my own without him. Tears drawn from the well of desertion form in his eyes. I’m his first love and his greatest disappointment.

The child’s assignment: “What is a city?” All dusk she sucks her pencil while cars swish by like ghosts, neighbors’ radios forecast rain, high clouds, diminishing winds: at last she writes: “The city is everyone.” Now it’s time for math, borrowing and exchanging, the long discipleship to zero, the stranger, the force that makes us what we study: father and child, writing in separate books, infinite and alone.

No one can wish nothing. Even that death wish sophomores are nouveau-glib about reaches for a change of notice. “I’ll have you know,” it will say thirty years later to its son, “I was once widely recognized for the quality of my death wish.” That was before three years of navel-reading with a guru who reluctantly concluded some souls are bank tellers; perhaps more than one would think at the altitude of Intro. Psych., or turned on to a first raga, or joining Polyglots Anonymous. One trouble with this year’s avant-garde is that it has already taken it fifty years to be behind the avant-garde of the twenties with the Crash yet to come. And even free souls buy wives, fall in love with automobiles, and marry a mortgage. At fifty, semisustained by bourbon, you wonder what the kids see in that Galactic Twang they dance the Cosmic Konk to. You will have forgotten such energy, its illusion of violent freedoms. You must suffer memory to understanding in the blare of a music that tires you. There does come a death wish, but you will be trapped by your begetting, love what you have given, be left waiting in a noise for the word that must be whispered. No one can wish nothing. You can learn to wish for so little a word might turn you all the bent ways to love, its mercies practiced, its one day at a time begun and lived and slept on and begun.

My poor students, all I ask of them is to grow antennae, lie down with lava and rise with snow, grow tongues from their math assignments and no, Melissa, your mother won’t approve of the bioluminescent smear on your communion dress. The world fidgets in uneasy relationship to our statements about it nevertheless producing silver buds from ragged limbs like the luster in late Frank Sinatra songs. Finally, when I got off the sixth floor, I felt like I was walking out into the sky and aren’t we all pedestrians of air? Doesn’t it feel all wrong to turn our backs on the ocean? On an ant? On those Chagall windows you have to go through a gauntlet of ancient armor to get to? What was her name, that night nurse so deft her blood draws didn’t wake me up? Don’t get me wrong, I want to wake up. I want my old dog to show me all that wolf-light she hides inside even though she thinks I won’t understand, even though her vet and I conspire to keep her alive forever.

It is mid-October. The trees are in their autumnal glory (red, yellow-green, orange) outside the classroom where students take the mid-term, sniffling softly as if identifying lines from Blake or Keats was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in words they never saw before. I am thinking of my parents, of the six decades they’ve been together, of the thirty thousand meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen, of the more than twenty thousand nights they’ve slept under the same roof. I am wondering who could have fashioned the test that would have predicted this success? Who could have known?

When the fire bell rang its two short, one long electric signal, the boys closest to the wall of windows had to raise the blinds and close the sashes, and then join the last of our line as it snaked out the classroom onto the field of asphalt where we stood, grade-by-grade, until the principal appeared with her gold Timex. We learned early that catastrophe must always be attended in silence, that death prefers us orderly and ordered, and that rules will save us from the chaos of our fear, so that even if we die, we die together, which was the calm almost consoling thought I had each time the yellow C.D. siren wailed and we would tuck ourselves beneath our sturdy desktops. Eyes averted from the windows, we’d wait for the drill to pass or until the nun’s rosary no longer clicked and we could hear her struggling to free herself from the leg-well of her desk, and then her call for us to rise and, like herself, brush off the dust gathered on our clothes. And then the lessons resumed. No thought of how easily we interred ourselves, though at home each would dream the mushroom cloud, the white cap of apocalypse whose funnel stem sucked glass from windows, air from lungs, and made all these rehearsals the sad and hollow gestures that they were, for we knew it in our bones that we would die, curled in a last defense— head on knees, arms locked around legs— the way I’ve seen it since in nursing homes and hospices: forms bedsheets can’t hide, as if in death the body takes on the soul’s compact shape, acrobatic, posed to tumble free of the desktop or bed and join the expanse and wide scatter of debris.