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Claws Mark the Doors
Once I wrote to flee,
now I simply erase;
still, they intrude,
like cats crying
for fish at my feet.
They will not go away:
avarice, decay, lies—
all ubiquitous as air.
Explanation’s weight
allows no time to think,
nor decipher machinations.
The charms of language
no longer protect me from
fangs slavering in the street.
(August 12, 2018)
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My 30th Year of Teaching
by
(part one)
I never wanted to be a teacher. Yet, I am about to start my 30thyear teaching in public schools in Texas. I have worked in four middle schools and three high schools, taught 7ththrough 12thgrade, taught newspaper, yearbook, English 7th-12thgrade, pre-AP English (8th-10th), Gifted and Talented middle school English, Advanced Placement Language and Composition, Advanced Placement Literature and Composition, Dual Credit English through Austin Community College, and The University of Texas at Austin. I even taught a German class for a semester. This year I will be teaching four sections of Advanced Placement Literature and Composition, and for the first time a creative writing class, as well as a film studies class, also for the first time. With an average of 150 students a year, I will have had contact with 4,500 students in my classrooms. My first students, 7thgraders in Beeville, Texas are turning 43 years old this year. It is possible that their 13-year-old children could have been in my class at one point in the last decade.
Over time I have come to like teaching, although every year I think about quitting and doing something else, but am never sure what it would be that I could do. Every few years for the last 30, I start to think I am pretty good at what I do, then something happens to make me realize that perhaps I am not as good as I think. Teaching is a humbling profession.
As a high school student I would have scoffed at the idea of becoming a teacher. The last thing I wanted was to return to school after graduating. Now I feel at home the most when I am in a classroom, either as a student or as a teacher. I left high school to become a journalist, but a professors advice to find the victim’s mother to get a good quote, drove me that same day to change my major to English. I like to write, although my first English advisor told me cynically and accurately, “One does not necessarily learn to write in English.”
Right out of college I worked as a baker at a local bakery in Austin, Texas French Bread. It was only for a few years that I worked there, but it still holds some of my fondest memories. One morning (4am) on the way to work, as I waited on the stop light to change, I thought I should do something with my English degree. When my shift ended at noon, I walked over to UT and found out what I needed to do to become certified to teach in Texas. A bit more than thirty years later, that quick, almost whimsical decision at a stop light led me to where I am now, teaching at an all girl public high school in Austin, Texas— and my life’s work.
(My plan is to write about my life as a teacher over the course of this school year. Topics will be determined pretty much in the same manner I decided to teach—through chance and whimsy).
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wicker man
by
first bits
then fragments
fall away
like branches
on fire
crack off
until
wholly ash
which wind then
wisps to air
adrift
incorporeal
a spirit singing
in each breath
(August 9, 2018)
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afterwards
by
She picked up his bones
scattered in the yard,
and took them into the house.
Her workshop was cluttered;
so she cleaned off a spot, and
orderly stacked them up.
Days went by, then weeks,
and finally years. The bones
collected dust like mementos.
One day, stumped, she looked
up from her work, and saw
the neatly stacked dry bones.
She laughed as she remembered
him, then went to work:
drilling, weaving, balancing.
She sang as she worked, happy
at last to be creating so freely
from his humble remains.
Finished, she took what she had
made from him, and hung
it from an old oak tree.
It danced a hollow dance,
clattering as the bones clacked
together with every wind.
In the evenings she would sit,
and sip a glass of wine, happier
than she had ever been with him.
(August 7, 2018)
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Right Here Where We Are
by
There are too many trees
in this forest for a trail
to easily follow home,
too many slavering wolves
to pay attention to the way.
Often, I tell stories without
telling stories as I teach.
Who has the time for hidden
messages? The metaphor’s too often
lost in the ubiquitous as it is .
Like now, one should mark this
turn on the path so we might
return again later as different
people who are no longer lost.
Of course, that would require
attention to where we are
now— accepting what’s here
as the only place to know,
and the only way we can be.
There is no one hiding
behind the trees, no fairies
dancing circles in the dark.
There are only our words
right here where we are.
(August 7, 2018)
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Permissions are Arbitrary
by
I understand myself
as a construct
given to me to understand
in the same manner
I understand you.
How well I conform
to a pattern
we both adhere towards
allows me a semblance,
to don, like an armor.
I am as much
your desire,
as mine;
as you are mine,
and yours.
(August 6, 2018)
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falling tree
by
With each assertion
tempered with doubt,
I quaver
and do not move—
as if a leaf
in autumn
indecisively about to fall.
Always on the cusp
of desire,
I stutter and fail.
What I would say
folds obliquely
into silence.
As if what one says matters,
when no one is there to hear.
(August 4, 2018)
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Drawl (read out loud)
A time to speak up
Think of it
Not
As punctuation,
But rather
Dialect, decorated
By accented diacritical marks.
If I speak in such
A manner that’s averse
To the way your words wander,
Perhaps you should listen
To how variations
Play across our story:
Resistance exists
Along the blade
Of consonant’s hiss and click.
As the oldest god
Has whispered before:
The word changes the world.
(December 20, 2017)
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Problematic Musings
by
Unless a care be taken to repair,
happiness is a tenuous lacework,
fragile and personal; the past
and present knot, like fate,
into seemingly intricate patterns
where one thread, time-worn
or simply stressed, snaps,
and the whole unravels into dust.
It comes to a question of hugs
or hurts, as if the two could easily
divide along traceable fault lines,
rather than entwine like caduceus.
I am conflicted as to the intent:
to be wary, or to pretend content.
(August 2, 2018)
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Flower as Metaphor
by
I am not a flower
about to bloom, nor
one whose petals have fallen.
I am not a flower,
nor is this poem
my prurient confession:
I am not a flower
worn like a corsage,
or draped on coffin tops.
I am not defined
like a bridal bouquet
for I am not a flower.
Flowers are more
than what they are;
I am only what I am.
(July 31, 2018)
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Transformed
by
after GBW
My veins are vines—
my arms, branches—
lips, soft moss:
Instead of sorrow,
I sing songs
of wind and rain.
(July 31, 2018)
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edges
by
1
the edges are all straight
in a puzzle, unlike a cliff
where the edges are pronounced
suddenly in a fading scream
falling away somewhere below
2
I am a puzzle piece. I try
to fit in, to be a part; yet
every thing’s so inconsequential
when scattered across a table
3
with a gasp, a slow hand grasps
at an edge, desperate like a juggler,
too late, after an errant ball
4
a puzzle piece slips from the table’s
edge, falling unnoticed to the floor
5
a pebble ticks the rock face as it falls
(July 30, 2018)
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Original Sin
by
If I hold cliché in my hand
like an apple, will I fall
to its seduction? Dare I bite
the peach, perhaps an avocado,
or pursue the nubile temptress
dancing a bare finger’s tip
out of reach? It’s laughable
to think I might escape it.
The original roots still leach
the metaphor from the soil,
while I root about like a pig
snuffling for elusive truffles.
Each word I speak is mine alone;
each word I speak has been said before.
(July 28, 2018)
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Mimesis
by
“I’ll be your mirror”
–Lou Reed
I try to write as I am. Of course,
I could be lying—but that’s the trick,
Isn’t it? To write through the skin
until the pen’s nib scratches dry bone,
until the face I present implodes
into the silence from which it rose.
Even when lies are unintended,
one only knows what one only knows:
the mirror lies as often as not.
(July 27, 2018)
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