but I like it and therefore am pairing them.

Sometime in the last weeks, this little gem was featured on American Life in Poetry. It reminded me of my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Arthur, who taught us about drawing, making paper mâché puppets, and putting on a "Punch and Judy" production with them. It especially brought to mind the the time my pals and I saw him with a woman at the movie theatre.  We thought it was the most interesting/scandalous/funny thing we had ever seen in our entire lives (all 10/11 years of them we had lived so far).

I hope it triggers a similarly enjoyable memory in you, and even if it doesn't, the poem is still marvelous.

Fayetteville Junior High
By Fleda Brown from her University of Nebraska Press selected poems, The Woods are on Fire.

What happened was, when we weren’t looking
Mr. Selby married Miss Lewis.
We tried to think of it, tiptoed Mr. Selby,
twirling the edges of blackboard numbers
like the sweet-pea tendrils of his hair,
all his calculations secretly
yearning away from algebra, toward
Miss Lewis, legs like stone pillars
in the slick cave of the locker room,
checking off the showered, the breasted,
flat-chested. All this, another world
we never dreamed of inside the bells,
the changing of classes:
Selby and Lewis, emerging
from rooms 4 and 16, holding hands
like prisoners seeing the sky after all those years.
“Bertha,” he says. “Travis,” she says.
The drawbridge of the hypotenuse opens,
the free throw line skates forward,
the old chain of being transcended
in one good leap, worn floor creaking
strange as angels. In homeroom, the smell of
humans, rank, sprouting, yet this hope for us all.

 

This arrangement of lavender from my backyard, in a vase from sister purchased in Sweden, has not one single thing to do with this poem, but I like it and therefore am pairing them. 

Comments

[jacki long]

I love both, thanks you!

[jacki long]

I, of course, means Thank you, Carol. I will someday proof before sending. Someday.

[Mary]

You inspired me to cut some of our lavender buds and put them in a little vase from Copenhagen! Nice poem too.

[carol]

Mary: nothing better than bringing in flowers from your garden... and especially if you have a vase from Copenhagen!