A song should be useful
for both dancing and crying. See them
gaily gad about. In “Pandora’s Box,”
Summer says that “promises were made
to be broken—that’s all that I ever learned
from loving you.” A student is someone
who finds a way to learn despite conspiracy
to make learning unlikely. Earlier refrains promised
less change: “I’ll like you for always, as long as
I’m living my baby you’ll be,” a terrifying
hex written to generate permanent
children. The Night Watch
saves the city from its dragon
in a world where “gender is more
or less optional.” In 2000, Pratchett says
that “Those interested in what is going on
write very positively – those who aren’t, don’t
notice.” A teacher is someone
who finds a way to insist on other people
learning even when they have failed
to teach. The panic of church stopped
when she sang, “And He will raise you
up on eagles’ wings.” It is possible
to put more feeling into the arrangement of discs
on a pre-dinner table than one
typically puts into prayer. The hard part
is clearing the books. “On the table, there
sits a rose.” In a second-grade journal
she asked her teacher if the mouse
with the motorcycle was polyphasic
but received no reply. Maybe
writers should not instruct. But school
tends to be where people first start
trying to tell someone else
about their life, though it’s the worst
place for the telling. One girl scout
was the first to ever fall from the ropes
course. This followed mastery of instructions
to tickle, as outlined in Big Bird Says. In college
poems she wrote of her “never jam today
friends,” by which she meant 1985 Carol
Channing morphing into a sheep
at the end of a song for Alice. Better
to be permanent students, or neither,
to instead join other people, only some
of whom write, in something more urgent
than school. Centaurs meant a lot
to her. At first, she liked their bare torsos
on book covers creeping out
teachers. That year, fertilizer made her
roses turn blue on the trellis. I guess
the hues they absorb affect the hues
they put out. Later, they became prompts
for a bad sonnet: “‘Which half of man
is the more manly half?” She still liked
the iamb, then. “Oh you took me
to the very top. And then I took a bad
and long long drop.” The Bridge to Terabithia
was banned, in part, for its “elaborate fantasy world”
that “might lead to confusion.” If you go
into the woods today, you better not go
without your best friend, who is “drunk
with color and form and hues,” his first time
seeing art, or you will die in the very land
you created and ruled. It was not banned
for promoting heterosexuality. Professors
are like “this is not a personal essay
class, why are you telling me
about your cancer?” or “this is
a personal essay class, could you try
to be more traumatized,” or “we
do not live in romanticism, why
do you appear in your own poem?
Replace yourself with an experiment.”
In art a ladder sometimes
masks as institutional
critique the desire to reach
heaven. Ten, she wrote a romantic thriller
where a boy whispers: “You broke my heart;
I broke your leg.” Later, she wanted to
cowrite, with her ex’s ex, a book
called What He Didn’t Tell Us, where “he”
would be not the man who left
one for the other and vice
versa, but about their teachers, who built
an imagined history of poetry
fixated on experimental writing, poems
that avoided their authors’ subjectivity
enough to disguise as a rejection
of conservative form a realer desire to hide
that the self doing the writing sort
of sucked. In A Wrinkle in Time, Mrs Whatsit
grows “wings made of rainbows, of light
upon water,” and of something worse, “poetry,”
but Calvin isn’t supposed to kneel. She hesitates
to take a new name, despite hers
being a question. This story
required them to pretend New
Narrative did not happen. In The Motion of Light
on Water, Delany describes coming
to understand that he and his wife
were raised in two “totally
different cultures” when he learns that
her pants lack pockets. But she had been looking
for consent, and no one needs permission
to write about their life. He turned at first
to science fiction with hopes of avoiding
the badness of reality. She experienced
a pupal stage where it was still possible
to find the presence of women itself
auspicious, wasted years reading
Robert Jordan. The gunslinger
followed. Delany too learned
his mistake. They need to find out
for whom they write and how much they care
if they are understood. Someone said yes
when they meant no. This was worse
than the times they had spoken correctly
and gone ignored. If they care
a lot, they need to read a lot
of things that are understandable
and try to identify the principles
of that intelligibility. She devoted
a few years of her adult
stage to the study of the late
style of Burroughs, of all the wife
murderers. Everyone hot,
to their knowledge, dealt with their childhood
confusion with the help of elaborate fantasy
worlds. And not grammar
or style, but what gives
the people you don’t mind
addressing access to what you are
trying to tell them. Maybe the not
hot, too. We are moving
in to the second half of a life
that, to date, has no end. There is orange
in the second column from the left
of Hilma af Klint’s Altarpiece. They understood
the pain of quiet where sound
had been expected.
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