Advanced Poetry
Sometimes we met with our questions
in the small furrows of a page,
perhaps the matter of a swan asleep
beneath a tree or the rain that drags
green apples from the branch.
I liked them most at their arrival,
when the classroom was a temporary field,
open and wide-skyed in all directions.
But it was possible to fear them too,
their faces difficult to read as any text
and the chalk dust like a shadow.
The weather could turn. The light
could go and leave behind a ground
they would not dig into—that kind
of work, they said, was violence.
And I was rarely human to their eyes,
more like a sharp pebble plucked
from a shoe. To me they were
so often a long stretch of wildflowers,
as if a uniformity of purple
blossoms planted near the highway,
all of them swaying together in the wind.
After Crying
For years, on the college honor board,
I asked about the body and its boundaries—
who owns that place, who enters it.
And then the respondent, as he was called,
would arrange his mouth into a room of grief.
On the TV, a woman is remembering
a hand across her face. She thought
that he might kill her accidentally.
Indelible, she says, in the hippocampus
is the laughter. The past is a hallway
that the mind cannot escape. For years,
on the honor board, I spoke with men
(they talked about themselves as boys)
with names like Matt or Brett, who held
their power casually, in the same easy way
they might have carried cans of beer
through a party. A man is weeping
on the screen today. Even now,
he’s secure in his confidence like one
of those houses on a sheltered street
where the trees go on for miles.
On the honor board, I saw how we judge
the worth of lamentation—the men,
with their shuttered eyes, their bodies
unbreachable, we place their tears
in bright decanters on a mantlepiece.
We spill the tears of women in the garden
to water the silky roses and the vines.
Course Evaluation
In that room, we held a tiny bird,
unfolding its corners first,
returning it to flattened paper,
touching the creases left behind.
We made and unmade cranes,
the wings uneven, beaks too big.
We grew tired of repetition.
How often we crumpled a tail
in crimping it or crushed a neck
with longing to form a floating thing.
We learned this work requires
sharp points, an understanding
of the edge. Eventually, we learned
the fierce precision of our hands.
An Essay on Cruelty
All day I watch her speaking
on the hill, the former ambassador
who knows the political is snow,
which gives beneath her feet. She says,
I don’t know how to put this into words.
It’s hard explaining cruelty—only
some have felt the coldness of its cut.
It must be frozen where she sits.
Once I saw a film about the Bolshoi.
Before the ballet director lost half
his sight, attacked with acid on the street,
his right eye a blizzard of unseeing,
there were months of warnings,
small shivers in the night.
Sometimes I used to tremble
with the weather, waiting for news
of when the wind would blow.
The president writes wherever
the ambassador went the world
turned bad. And her face on the screen
is a field of deepening furrows.
Once I saw myself in anyone
who stood at the center of a storm.
Cruelty has a pattern possible to trace—
it’s not all swirl and bluster, but brief
intensities of nothing going wrong.
I’m watching late into the dark.
Someone speaks about the chilling effect,
that threats are like December,
the way the season turns the surface
of a lake unbreakable, while
underneath a body batters against
the water gone suddenly to glass.
Photo credit: Cedric Terrell