first teachers

This week I have made useful things: calendars, notebooks, discussion protocols, pages students will soon fill with questions I hope matter. By Friday my eyes are bloodshot, nerves down my arm burning again. Every note in my notebook begins, “Remember to make…” And yet. In the stillness of the rare breath, a returning question reminds me: remember what first taught you, love. To look. 

I have had a touch-and-go relationship with standing inside my own truth. Whatever I was as a child seemed to make for easy killing. I wanted not to die. I wanted to become better at living.

My teachers were shorelines & trees; stones & beneath them; beyond the beyonds, where whales surfaced & disappeared again. I followed the tracks of dead writers, looking for clues. 

This week, Heschel offers three things I need. He says, Always we are chasing. And then: Recollection is a holy act. He uses the phrase “Sublime grandeur…” & I cannot remember the rest.

I write each into the margin beside reminders to photocopy poems & order hanging file folders. Also, ear drops for the cat. I do not think she is drinking enough water.

Imagine the composer whose music, too long for the market, sings just long enough for strays to inhabit. Whose reviewers ask politely, must it be like this? 

Thank you, love. For running ahead, then stopping. Waiting until the rest of us catch up. I chase you, passing wooden bodies behind bars. I wait with them, my mirrored selves. Whose arms reach where our trunks may not follow. At the terminal, a woman waits half inside shadow. Maybe to board, or else forever.  To leave this furniture-piece of the self.

To return to the humiliating glory of flesh. Tomorrow the bells will ring again, and my eyes will return to their watering ache. To close & listen to morning birds. Somewhere beneath asphalt, distant roots will continue their epistolary. Further still, whales carrying songs. The stubborn composer refuses to hurry. A sculpture continues waiting in her cage. I follow behind these, in their tracks. To walk as I wait.