(for Andrea, 2002)
has less to do with mind
more with raw elements:
more to do with sense
less with
stuff the fakers use to bless with:
trophies, bank
accounts, and an extra tank
accounts, and an extra tank
or two in their whoopassmobile.
The things that teachers know are steel
(stainless, more nickel),
and if you offer one of them a pickle
(s)he’ll nibble it daintily
and say, “How faintly
sweet it is to taste!
There is no waste,
and it is crisp, delightful.”
(Quite like a room of otherwise
frightful
brats their parents cannot fathom
mentally
yet coincidentally
under your supervision
they give up television
and miraculously acquire
souls, like a Tabernacle Choir.)
Teachers also know things titanium
(strong, lightweight), politely
cramming each cranium
full of what to know and do.
Like a geyser of molten goo
each small mind will overflow and ooze
back into its own core, then choose
how to live a life and make it work.
Not one will shirk
duties to the children yet unborn.
The future then won’t be forsworn
but full of lessons
each one packed with blessings
in between the details of a plan.
(Everybody’s desk is spic and span
on the last day of school, but hidden
in some dust bunny in the corner,
unbidden,
lies a history of civilization,
what to know and do. A realization
of what works, endures.
Responsibility for it all was yours
and so is credit, now, that might not
otherwise be given
despite how many field trips you have
driven.)
And teachers know things gold,
untarnishable now as in the old
times when one cold winter, 1888,
a midwestern blizzard kept the children
late
at school, then almost froze them hard
before their parents tunneled through
the yard
to dig them out. Their freezing teachers
lay on top beneath the snow, using
creatures’
warmth to insulate
the children from the cold, whose
weight
like frozen metal chilled them all.
Imagine how the bottom child would call
up frightened, asking, “Will they ever
come?”
and hear the shivered answers “Soon”
and “Soon”—then none.
And then the sound of shovels in the snow
the rolling off of corpses, and, below,
children warm, still living
on the heat their teachers had been
giving
at their own expense. (One or two
survived but lost their legs. You
and I both know that was their thanks.)
They knew their calling. Neither snowbanks
nor the pittance in their pockets made
a difference.
Nothing else mattered: moldy bread,
stiff rents,
strictures of boards that made the
teachers do what they would not.
What teachers did in those days was
fraught
with contradictions. Still, what they knew was gold.
(May you never know a cold
that makes you forget what you have
donated
to civilization, so like a stone,
weighted
down with itself and the knowledge of
its own sinking.
Instead, may you be thinking
of the bubbles you blew,
carrying children higher than they knew
at the moment but eventually learned.
at the moment but eventually learned.
May all your thoughts be turned
skyward. May you see them
laughing, waving, rising like the hem
of your marm-skirt when you swing shut
the door behind you,
turn gaily to the other mind you
closeted till you had time to think.)
The world is always at some brink
or other, and we careen like Nascar
fools in such a hurry.
We would each be one small drop of
mercury
rolling its heavy poison puddle
wherever culture tilted us, doomed to
befuddle-
ment except for what teachers like you
have made us know and do.