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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