by
I’ve never been free:
approbation and fear
a constant tap-tap
at my shoulder,
as a reminder— “No,
do not go there.
Stay inside this truth.
It’s comfortable here.”
Justly, it is never
too warm to sweat,
nor cold enough to shiver.
There are no bears here,
lost in their quandaries
as to my medial decisions.
(September 3, 2018)
On another night
years ago,
the air, like ash,
still warm
after the burning
day, we lay
in the cool grass
watching the moon,
tangled in the oak
trees, coyly slip
between trailing clouds.
We were happy
and in love,
nothing between us
but skin.
(September 1, 2018)
“All life is a foreign country”
–Jack Kerouac
All my life my tongue
could not curl about
the words spoken here—
my teeth cut my cheek
as I stumbled over
simple words, simple ideas.
I was silenced in simple
misunderstandings, in fear
of the wrong word spoken
too loudly, too softly,
or not at all.
I wish I were
a mockingbird able
to flit between the leaves
singing the song of others;
to speak earnestly around
the mundane bits of life
we share, like now, or mimic
an old man’s nod of greeting,
or children’s laughter outside
this window; or to simply cross
over the border to a home.
(September 1, 2018)
by
My old tai chi master
watched his students
study their college texts,
then laughed explosively
into the silence
of the courtyard,
our open air dojo.
We all looked up
like gazelle’s scenting
the air. He laughed
again, then said,
“There should be a book
on how to watch clouds.”
We looked at him quizzically.
“All it would say
on every page—
Look Up!”
(August 28, 2018)
“chiseller of inaccuracies”
–Fernando Pessoa
I would not speak
if I knew what to say.
There would be no need
to form words around
an unrealized dream.
It is the unsaid
which must be given
shape; which calls us
from its shapeless dark
to speak into existence
what we cannot know.
Yet, I know so little
about so much, I must
speak about it all.
I start where I am
which is always here.
First, I must listen,
discern the shapes
before I can speak.
My words carve out
what is there
from what is not
as the silence unfolds
a new kind of truth.
(August 23, 2018)
by
While the mendacious moan
their pious exclamations
to smother any dissent,
a metaphor translates thought,
holds out the broken leaves
as an offering from the gods,
an opening to move through
to find a different bend
in the light you’ve come to know.
The ground, slightly uneven,
is common enough, a solid
base to build upon.
Simple words whispered
into temples and prisons.
(August 21, 2018)
by
Questions
which remain unanswered,
as if on a student exam,
befuddle me. I wonder
the possibilities: lack of time,
lack of knowledge, lack of trust.
Some stay silent, although known,
because the question
was never asked—or
never formed
clearly enough to be able
to be asked. Or I feared
the answers might be
the ones I desired.
(August 19, 2018)
“I live by impulse, by emotion, by white heat”
–Anais Nin, “Henry and June, A Tunnel of Love
impulse would not wait
to feel the white intensity;
with no emotion to attach,
she’d coldly leap away,
unfinished, unresolved.
no tidy ends in escape,
just bloodied stumps
where our hands were
torn away through neglect,
and unrequited regret.
(August 19, 2018)
by
It is familiar enough
to be familiar, but no
more: a scratch in the dark
which stops when you stop
to listen to what you think
is a sound somewhere nearby,
but it’s just you thinking
in the silence to the dark.
It’s absence breathes heavily
as if aroused with metaphor
still clinging to its half-formed kiss.
It waits on memory to form
a shape which conforms to desire’s
simple reduction to a truth.
(August 17, 2018)
by
It’s not fair to compare
one to the other where secrets
are apropos to a love affair,
or some distant war as far
as that goes. Yet, what’s to be
done to stop it? What metaphor
within yourself were you willing
to sacrifice? As long as one
doesn’t mind water swallowing
your words, it’s simple enough
to drown in any nearby river.
I, too, hold my expectations
at a distance in order to live—
I’m not sure what occurred,
or even if we were just lovers.
(August 15, 2018)
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)
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).
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)
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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