This is How Poetry is Made
We’re going outside to write poems, I tell my students. Last year, I taught in Salt Lake City, near city edge. A canal carried garbage thrown by students. Our dreams were industrial and iridescent like oil scum on the current. But I teach in Oregon now. Here, nature is close. Woodpeckers hammer holes into the school and loggers, beard-to-chest, clear-cut forests. Build homes with trees they lost limbs to while harvesting and working the mill to feed families. It’s fall and ivy turns crimson.
Now is the gentle season of milkweed opening. A brown seed is pulled up by its silky parachute.
“Watch how it floats,” I say. Most could care less, but I do it anyway, eyes to sky. A witness. This is how it is for teachers. We swallow their indifference because for one, it will matter.
“The wind brushes through my hair.” Laura reads. She’s shy, with nut-brown hair to her waist. “I hear light whispers,” she says. How about, light whispers, I say.
“Can we go to the creek? Just up there, in the shade,” Ronnie points ahead.
We pass elementary kids on a jog-a-thon. A baseball diamond gone to weeds three summers ago. Children run freely, like young animals. Ronnie shakes a tree. Another dances.
Sit down, I tell them.
They land in soft places beside the creek. Near soil. Near the softer flow of water through a culvert. River pours dark decay on our gathering. Peace settles and I forget the violence of this town. I forget mornings when I wake at three a.m. afraid of my new students. They say this town was different before the mill shut down. “Economic downturn,” was not a abstraction because no jobs led to poverty, drugs and abandoned children. I like to imagine this town was once a place of baked pies and laughter from front porches, but it’s not been that way for years. Now it’s a place for swapping tinctures of Motherwort because pharmacists will kill you. Of storing stuff for End of Days: ammo, canned peaches and Confederate flags. This was an enclave for white supremacists; a sun-down town. And so I bravely tried to teach, To Kill a Mockingbird, but my student’s wild eyes at parent conference when his Klan father came into the room, gun on hip, MAGA hat red like the blood he could spill. The way his wife shook when he stroked her arm. The way I was not brave after all.
In the woods, leaves fall like kindness, shush, shushing students to silence and I forget about the sadness. I forget about the rape jokes the boys tell and I forget about the kid who brought a pistol to school last year and brandished it while a teacher’s back was turned. Or of the boy who stayed after class to tell me loggers chain-sawed environmentalists to death. And of the mom so strung out on meth she stares into our room from a park bench all day like a demon, so her son sits far from the window.
For students, this public school is a shelter, but only behind hoodies and earbuds. Cocooning themselves in music to forget. But I can’t forget the town’s schizophrenics. The homeless. The tweakers. I can’t forget about the incarcerated parents and children orphaned by heroin. Of the furious and lost who grew up without parents and without rules. I can’t stop thinking about this broken little town how to make it better. One day, I bought a dozen English McMuffins from McDonalds and fed my students before school. The wildest turned docile, like wild birds coming to my hand for seeds. After months of fighting, I realized, all this time they’ve just been hungry.
But we go outside this day. In the forest, the world is whole. My students bed-down like deer. Leaves underfoot, like crepe-paper dresses of small fairies, discarded after a summer of dancing. From a log, Ronnie fishes things from the green-black water, a candy wrapper; ball and shoe. Because the creek is a place of mystery. When I ask why he hasn’t picked up his pencil, he says, “I’m not the poetic type.”
But he is and that’s why he’s not afraid to reach into the dark water. This is how poetry is made.
Others lift images from their minds and write. An elk whistle calls. A hunter out there? A father? This is how poetry is made. Close enough I worry the hunter might mistake my students for wild game and wound them. I strain to hear. A bird whoos from a Cottonwood. Elk whistle again. Cows bellow.
Bang, bang, bang, bang. Students flinch. Wind shucks trees of leaves.
Was this the moment an elk lost his life to a gun? Did the forest mourn? I walk to the road to see the reason for the wind. Maybe a truck coming? But nothing, except this procession of leaves. What if we just caught how the world changes the moment a being dies. Does nature mourn? My students, half in leaf-shadow, half in light, look up, curious about the wind too.
My father was a hunter, but he killed animals only to feed us. He never told rape jokes. And never abused his children or wanted to kill people. We lived for years in poverty and he wasn’t always happy, but he never got so strung out on drugs he forgot he was a father. What you’re going through at home is not normal, I want to tell my students, but they know. Don’t they?
On the way back, I pick a milkweed pod. My dad died when the milkweed pods were opening, I show it to Laura, a student I could trust to be sensitive.
“My dad left us,” she tells me, her voice going softer. “In January.”
In the dead of winter, I say.
Back in class I ask: Was it easier to write out there?
Yes, they repond. Why? They don’t answer with words. But they know. They say it with their eyes.
This is how poetry is made.
