connection Archives

the training

and its quiet cousin

We went where the children were, into the concrete buildings that announced themselves from a distance by their rectangles of fluorescent light before dawn, each classroom another illuminated cell in which a small republic would soon attempt the impossible.

We drove there carrying lesson plans, coffee, sharpened pencils, and private theories about service. Some of us had hints about some calling. We also hoped to one day be worthy of homes and worthy of citizenship, despite the wayward, wandering nature of our pilgrimish selves. We privately fingered some phrases about the nature of this calling, as with prayer beads. We learned to do this while sidestepping certain reflections, their attendant questions. To serve whom? Serve what? Serve how?

Inside the lit boxes of concrete, copy machines predictably jammed and bells divided the hours into predictable portions. Loudspeaker voices droned on, with a scripted confidence that seemed to expose our own uncertainty. Lord, I believe, I prayed on my knees, rosary between my shrinking breasts, heal my unbelief.

There were forms for absences, interventions, accommodations, referrals, observations, evaluations, emergencies. Somewhere beneath the paperwork, a quieter practice breathed its ragged breath. It was not the sort to be documented, so tended to be found lacking when it came time to speak in its defense. We were quiet in meetings, or coughing.

Some of us imagined that if we served long enough, well enough, we might eventually become free of ourselves. It seemed noble at the time. No one warned us that the self is not only the thing that interferes with attention. It is also the place from which attention is given. Grind it finely enough and something essential becomes dust.

It settles everywhere. The children breathe it. So do we. Outside, the century acquired stranger habits. Bats slept with white upon their noses. Birds disappeared from places that had always expected birds. The seasons arrived carrying unfamiliar weather. We learned new acronyms faster than new names. Every year another expert assured us that the future had finally been measured correctly. The children kept arriving anyway.

***

The week before I began teaching, I attended a county training wearing the best clothes I owned: a purple spaghetti-strap dress beneath a crocheted sweater arranged carefully across my shoulders, an improvised modesty. I needed a paycheck before I could afford professional costume. I can’t remember what I did for shoes.

I arrived late after misjudging the parking and found the last empty seat beside two young men who already seemed entirely at ease in the room. They were funny, bright, and quick-witted with soft jibes and easy answers. They were the sort, I see now, upon whom institutions instinctively confer authority.

“That’s a rough school,” one of them said when I told him my assignment. Then he explained how I ought to meet the moment. I listened carefully because I assumed he knew something I did not.

Twenty-two years later I remember almost none of his advice. What remains is the question that kept me listening. It was too raw to say aloud. What do the children need, to live here now? The two questions occupied the same room, and rarely acknowledged one another.

Years before, when I was the age that my children are now, a teacher had handed me a box of tissues and gave me space to sit awhile. She did not explain my sorrow or try to fix it. She did not ask me to become more positive or more resilient or more realistic. She recognized that bewilderment sometimes accompanies seeing and let me sit in her office as long as I needed before marching on to my scheduled class. This was some of the most profound instruction of my life.

***

In the decades since that first training, I know more now about curriculum, assessment, language acquisition, trauma, literature, and revision. Mostly, though, I know about the limits of certainty. Enough, perhaps, to stop mistaking certainty for wisdom.

Meanwhile, the children continue arriving, carrying entire worlds that no data set, policy document, or professional development session could possibly anticipate. They arrive laughing with friends. They arrive grieving grandparents, translating for their families, having crossed borders both visible and invisible before first period. They arrive eager, despite everything their forebears have constructed around them.

This, the part that steadies me on my better days, still knows nothing of expertise. She places all the eggs of her shaking faith in a single basket, calls it nothing. It is neither measurable, or scalable, or capable of surviving particularly well in committee. It’s nothing, but a stubborn belief that another consciousness can still be met with attention.

Each morning another consciousness walks through the door asking, Will someone meet me here?

The loudspeaker begins its announcements. The attendance form waits to be filled, then saved. Somewhere beneath all of this, another lesson clears its throat. The children are here. For now, that is enough to begin again.

origin song

regarding migration

If you were born where your first language
was never called words, then no one could persuade you
that silence is empty, and somewhere the swifts, the whales,
your oldest kin would still be calling.

They can tell you are far from them now,
but not enough to forget
how rivers remember when rains return, to rise
so sea bells hang briefly from branches now fish-kissed,
and the snakes you watch without naming,
the delta birds—
you wonder if they have heard your other names.

Maybe what calls
is no memory at all,
but the pull that turns whales
toward waters they have never seen,
that curves a swallow’s wing,
the hidden maps of swimming salmon,
the green
that climbs toward light.

Whatever this soft astonishment is—
star-fire held a while in bone,
let it lean
toward the wet-feathered ones,
the slitherers who kiss bark
with their bellies,
the blooming.

And if I remain
half forgetting,
half listening,
let me hear
still, small songs
in the fig tree,
hush of fur near enough
until what some dark cavity

of my inner ear
keeps calling
origin song
turns out not to be

before now,
but arriving,
asking only
whether we are still able
to follow.

first teachers

toward remembrance

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.

undocumented gravities

what bends the fabric

One physicist told me: picture a bowling ball in the fabric,
the fabric caving in—why bodies fall toward one another,

spinning. How spacetime curves. My grandmother spoke of weight
in other ways: the hush between names in an unread ledger of losses.

I finger that line, the jagged edge of scab, the raw grain Ellison heard
scraping every blues. What do I do with this mass of memory

now bending every moment into its warp? She lost her mother
to fog-lung at nine, crossed alone to a house with chandeliers,

quiet corrections. Her eyes went dark when I asked about the war.
She kissed me once, called me her lost sister’s name,

then whispered into the rosary beads drawn from pocket to lips.
A song she didn’t teach me hums in my sleep.

Here is a shape made of silence. A dark bloom:
cells within cells, watched by a thousand quiet endings

spreading? Grief is such a mass, perhaps, when left unspoken:
a metastasis of memory in a land that names the stranger alien.

I am trying to reach mine, cannot find where it begins.
It arrived before language, encoded in the spiral of blood,

older than my name. Like starlight long gone, still arriving.
I squint into the most distant layer of stars: fine dust.

Some of it shines from bodies long dead,
their last emissions only now arriving

here. Their light arrives always without their names
like a jagged, cracked-open ledge,

this brief flesh against it,
struggling to sound.

This poem recently appeared in Sky Island Journal, Issue 35.

without the use of now

after an unlived hour

She lived in the hour. He kept it for later.

The body learns. At first by leaning—tentative, offering its small faith in the moment, then less so.

The mouth that hungers for bread learns the shape of waiting. How to soften the edge of asking. What it means to accept how he forgot—not by cruelty, but by being nowhere at all when it mattered.

When it mattered: paper towels, toilet paper, the coffee gone. The latch he knew needed fixing, leaving someone to know they were still at risk while he knew it, did nothing. This is how absence accumulates: a field of what must be thought of by someone.

He is many things, most of them possible. In the end, he is not that someone. Not careless—that would imply contact. Something else. Drawn again into the bright perimeter of what might be.

No idea so good as the next idea. No plan like the one untried. No life like the one he has yet to begin—this one, finally, worthy of him.

Meanwhile, she begins to sort what can be carried; what must be thrown away; what cannot be asked for again. The body keeps score even when the mind refuses.

At the water, he is something else again. Watch how he rides the wave cleanly, beautiful in it, held by the same force that could take a life. He does not look back—not by choice, but because the frame does not include it.

Behind him, outside the shot, someone learns the cost of air.

Later, he will say it was a good day and mean it. Tomorrow, he announces, will come. The other day he speaks of is always the one that has the best of him.

Never this one. Never the hour that asks to be met.

Here, he is a maker of atmosphere. A summoner of possibility. He can speak a future into near belief. Who would not follow that voice. Who would not, once or twice, be pulled back into its hold.

He kept himself intact for a future unveiling. Called this becoming.

She lived among the opened things: torn roll, empty shelf, the latch that would not catch. Her body learned how not to lean.

He did not think himself absent. Where he lived, the hours gathered for his arrival. Nothing began until he did.

Her questions thinned, then fell away. In their place: the work. The hour, arriving whether held or not, asked to be lived by someone.

Years passed. From time to time, he spoke again of beginning.

She, already inside the life of daily flesh, did not answer.

where we stood, watching

on those who mistook their heights for flight

Consider this, we tried—but held still when they raged. We were about to say babies, offer skillets, call on memory. We learned to hold our words, to stand instead, ever ready with arms at our sides, palms open. We held them through their nightmares and when they raged that we knew nothing of their wars.

They did not come toward us. Their bodies knew a direction, some center pointing, but they had trained themselves away from it.

We waited for a decision that did not arrive. No more war at the threshold, or bringing it home, or calling its conquest flight. We held our tongues, tasting blood and what. We could not say. Stay, we pressed, a whisper. It was not a command, but a reminder of contact with the living. Here, we said, and offered skin. A reminder of how tender the flesh that holds us here, how barely.

Their systems grew intricate. Machineries of belief meant to lift them, and we grew tired of these heights, sensing the fall pre-written.

Milk leaked. Children cried to them—look, see me—but the angle was wrong. Too low. Sometimes they would lift a child as if testing the weight. We held our breath.

Our bodies became passage—grease for the next idea, pillows where their heads had been. We learned to move on.

The next thing was the children. They wanted to fly, too, but we did not throw them. Not with one on each hip, a basket of laundry, onions cut open on the board.

Here is where they stepped in, who were here so briefly. To do the throwing. Up! They lifted. Up, up! they shouted.

The children screamed. Again!

a field in which opposites attempt a body

after Hilma af Klint

Make of me a glass and through it this kiss. One bends her neck, blue-white into his, pale against the dark field above him, to pierce the edge of that night. Another, below her, reaches for where the light ends, the craning neck, the body a dark field beneath it. Wing tip.

The cold outside, the dark. Inside, these brightly colored forms. Swirl now. Spread. This is an opening. Now an egg petal. Now what are these shapes. Is this the moon? Whispers, how does it mean. Someone suggests religion. It is years before Kandinsky.

What radiates from this. What broke its wings for this landing. Say it is a swan. Say it is light. Dark. Say there is before this blue-footed white feathered swan, another. Say this other, black-feathered on yellow feet, is reaching. Up to pierce the light that shows his dark. That the other reaches down. That the tip of their wings touch, and their beaks. What night is this through which the white swan reaches.

One body running in paint. Show me the next. Another body. I have not cried. Yet this week. Cannot turn my head. Backache, shoulders pinioned in firelight. I lay this dark head on the ground. Then breathe. Watch my breathing. As though by watching I could move its hush to cool that sparking fire. Breathe, then. Turn the neck. Watch sparks click again.

I will give. This fire an offering to that swan. Present this fire as the site on which this body may be offered up. Take it, then. O light. What are you? Speak.

Now with another. Trace where she had been. Her body unfeathered now. The smooth wear of this skin. The jagged edges of old scars now striped into the wear lines. I want to change what I am seeing. I feel this next war changing me. I am wanting. To make some alterations first. What sky against what day. What body now in rubble. What in the decorated tomb. What body armed, who bleeds. What unmoved will make what of the body now seated with a pen. For tracing feathers on the wings of birds. Who listens now for birds in this silence. Over the machine, a high round melody. Looping. Something loose. In the machine where the bird might. See it.

***

Inspired by The Swan, No. 17 (1915)

ochild

notes toward a minor crossing

one day
I will tell you in music
what I mean

and show
by the curve
of my bowed back

this violin

and wait
while you remember

and say
by this instrument—

listen

I will show you
the sound a bird means

singing

above her heart
pounding

too fast
for you to follow

while alive

and I will say gently

try baby

and for a moment

you will

and you will
try baby

still alive

(meaning what?)

then
you will know
what I mean

enough
for us to leave

and be still again

the problem of shape

preliminary findings

The year I learned the war was inside me — even if some of its battles were without — I began rummaging through the wreckage, hoping to find more than detritus accumulated from years of warring. Around the mess: sky.

I had wanted to be a bespoke collection of formidable weight, but I was discovering I was one part bargain-basement yard sale, another part fairytale creatures — some feathered, some furred, some horned, some visible, many unseen.

And the last part of me was something else. It wasn’t the war exactly, or the yard sale, or any single one of these creatures. Here was a drifting thing, like a cloud.

How long had I tried to pin her down? Or, when I couldn’t, solicit outside help. There are always people eager for this work — telling the unruly body of a woman (ethereal or enfleshed) how she should behave, ready to point her back toward some imagined vessel of herself.

Mine was always either pouring out or sponging in.

I told myself I would learn to regulate the leaking. To absorb less. To hold my shape. I may have been lying.

In defiance of common sense, I was more interested in the experiment. I kept testing it, again and again, in different ways: how much could I take, how much could I let flow away?

It had to do with boundaries. Mine were the kind cell walls have — osmotic. I wanted to know what that meant. I wanted to live it better than I had.

I knew this would make no sense, so I kept it to myself.

I spoke instead of love. And of endurance.

what learned to stop rising

On the Golden Toad (Incilius periglenes)

The year the rain didn’t come, the toads did not rise. This creature required conditions, resisted the rescue of cages. They lived most of the year underground, waiting for the world to signal conditions for their appearance.

When they emerged, they emerged together, bright as warning, an astonishing whole. A joyous display, observers said. It would not stand for translation. When the clouds changed and the pools would not hold, the pattern discontinued.

Their discovery and disappearance happened in quick succession. The last of it when I was eleven.

I knew nothing of the toads at the time. I was learning to read the atmosphere, to time emergence. How to translate the strange creature I was into more legible forms.

The process, I was learning, required aggressive taming. The first rule of living here was learning: one must not be too much. Too expressive, too taken by joy, eruption, wonder, body.

I never saw the toad. By the time I was old enough to take my own inventory of loss, she had long since lost the predictable rains she needed to appear, having entered the realm of beings named only after they are gone.