“We thought of life by analogy with a journey; with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end: success or whatever it is- or maybe heaven, after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played.”
It has now reached ridiculous levels.
They are not only the kind of people
Who care more about the X in the box, Not a check, an X!
More about that little tiny box
With an X (not a check) in it,
Than what it means to educate.
They care more about punishing See? I took care of it! Aren’t I good?
Than teaching.
They have no idea that they are a joke: The laugh of the district.
They think they are modeling positive behavior
But I can see the skin is starting to stretch thin
Around their mouths.
I am waiting for it to tear like wet paper
And for the ink to run
Down their chins.
I am waiting for rain, for the circus,
For Something to Happen. I am waiting for Truth.
She drags her muddy boots
Across too-shiny linoleum.
She carries a complete set
Of encyclopedias on her head.
She is not interested in the
Black-and-white photos of Lennin,
The pale maps of North Carolina,
The out-dated population of China.
She balances them and they sway with her hips.
She has all the facts at her disposal
And she likes the way it makes her walk.
She shaped her fingers, like sausages,
Into K’s and extended them across the table to me.
She tapped one chubby little hand over the other,
Rings asparkle,
Nails french-manicured.
Her mouth exaggerated the word.
And the puppet next to her stared at the table,
Plastered with sticky-notes of tasks
She had scribbled and placed there during the meeting.
He squirmed in his chair,
His brown eyes, like puddles,
Spread and rippled in front of me.
My face tried on emptiness.
It didn’t fit: too small
for my bursting features.
I felt my eyes turn to rocks
And my jaw to steel.
“Careful,” she signed and mouthed,
Arms stretched toward me.
But the other words in my brain
Crowded around it
And the sparkling, manicured Careful
Whined and cowered
As the circle tightened.
I forced a smile,
Trying to blur the edges to
Disguise the smirk,
I nodded until my chin bounced
Off the Table.
I focused on the green sparkle
Of the bejeweled sausage
To control the din of my thoughts.
Blue, the color of distance and depth
Can burn like stars
Or, like the moon, fix you with a cold gaze.
Alone, and surrounded, she ducks to
Enter the room. She fills it up
With the world she carries around.
The Wolf, stalking the moonlit forest,
Silver in the blue wood,
Can see each movement,
Each insect’s breath and
Each quivering leaf.
She can taste the wind blowing seasons away:
Through bared branches and
Fronds of maidenhair;
Tangling the berry briars and
Softening its blood-black fruits.
She can stand Here and smell
Yesterday and Tomorrow:
The river’s wild and
A patch of roses,
Just springing from
Frozen blue earth.
No one can tell me for certain
That the raindrops aren’t
Twinkling back messages
Only the boy can understand.
They seem to enjoy falling
On the visored hood of his
Rain jacket. They
Leap onto his shoulders and
Dance down his arms.
He raises his hands to them.
He cannot hear them
Pat his hood,
Drum the metal roof behind him,
Or plop onto the pavement where he stands.
His hands make shapes
That fit perfectly between
His raindrops.
The shapes make pictures
On a silver canvas.
The rain falls and dances,
Twinkles then splashes around him.
The boy smiles and
Paints pictures in the air.
He tilts his face toward the
Clouds and they
Drench him with splishy kisses.
It doesn’t matter that your performance was scheduled last May. It doesn’t matter that the Principal said more than 3 times that he would support you and defend that date. It doesn’t matter that you’ve already advertised and notified parents of rehearsals and performance dates. It doesn’t matter that we work all semester adapting a script into ASL, not to mention prep work and costuming and design and vision. It doesn’t matter.
Why? Sports will always win. Sports produces date rapers, dog fighters, high school principals, and men who think they need to answer to no one. Sports is the best example of our f’d-up society’s f’d-up priorities, paying professional athletes ridiculously huge amounts of money and teachers ridiculously small. Sports is a money-maker. A turducken of wasted energy. A source of surface metaphors. A slogan. As deep as a mud puddle.
Then they smile at you the next day and call you dramatic. It’s better than being vulgar, slithering worms!
Kim Stafford asked me what a lullaby might look like in American Sign Language.
Before I assign this to my class, I thought I’d throw in an attempt of my own. I know that most of the students will blow mine away, since they are native signers and have a library of incredible descriptives at their fingertips. My expression is stored in my tongue and comes out with all of these little polluters: prepositions, articles, verb endings and other little clouders of pure conceptual thinking. Those details aren’t absent in ASL, just more subtle: an arc of the eyebrow, a nose crinkle, a curled lip.
This is the first thing I’ve “written” on my fingers first, then interpreted into English.
All is quiet, time to sleep;
Close your eyes,
Baby sweet.
The stars are twinkling out in space;
The moon is rains sapphires on your face.
The wind is blowing the trees around;
The grass bends over on the ground.
All is quiet, time to sleep;
Close your eyes, baby sweet.
Outside the door, the future waits;
But you’re safe inside from indifferent fate.
Joy and grief, peace and strife,
Breath and Death: your little life.
All is quiet, time to sleep;
Close your eyes, baby sweet.
Your pillow’s soft, your blanket warm;
Love will rock you in her arms.
All is quiet, time to sleep;
Close your eyes, baby sweet.
Celebrating Mortality
