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The first morning I walked my youngest son to kindergarten the soft sun cut his hair into shards of lit hay. Our arms swung in unison, big hand leading small, and I heard his book bag thwack his back twice for every step I took. I thought I would feel free, would feel the sky dive beneath me, lift me above the school. I wanted to leap into career, be something Big, someone Big, Important, be a damn Big Shot.
If you had asked me that moment anything about poetry I would have laughed, would have remembered my eleventh grade teacher, the one with the black leather jacket and perpetual sneer. Mr. Adamski ruled the room with seventies hip, with well-timed cuss words and the scent of clove cigarettes wafting around careful words.
"Ladies and gents," he'd say. "Open your fucking poetry book."
The class tittered, flinched. More than one of us checked the closed door to be sure the Vice Principal wasn't scouring the halls with his brillo pad attitude.
"Turn to page 51. Let's recite."
We'd punch out vowels that Plath once held, consonants from Ginsberg's pocket, yell stanza after stanza into the stale air. I loved it, loved the bounce of my voice against the others', the way Mr. Adamski leaned back in his wooden chair, booted feet secure on desk, his eyes closed in rapture as if our chants brought him closer to that good rolled hash he enjoyed after hours.
Most poems didn't make sense to me. The smart kids got it, could chat with Teach about hidden metaphor, about Plath's suicidal angst. I sat in back with the potheads, with the shop-class crowd, a scuffed home ec book under my seat instead of the Latin texts the front-seaters carried.
I love these sounds. I love these sounds.
I remember reciting this mantra, remember trying to pry something other than ear candy from the exercise. Nothing else ever came. The day I quit school, the day I ran from home, the day I discovered I was, I couldn't be, pregnant, the day my mom and dad didn't notice my bed kept lonely watch. I tossed my poetry book into my neighbor's thick hedge. A corner stuck out as if to say Hey! Don't leave me! You need me! but I kicked it deep into the mess of prickly leaves.
Take that, stupid smart kids! Take that! I don't understand you! I hate you! I hate poetry! I hate it! It's only for smart kids and I'm not one of them! Everything is for smart kids! I hate school! I don't want a baby! No one loves me anyway!
I didn't stop running, hitching, crying, until a kind old coal miner left me on a Seattle sidewalk, three thousand miles from that poetry book, a ragged twenty in my hand. I stood in line at the employment assistance office day after day, filled out form after form, met with pasty faced placement officers and nothing, just nothing happened. I walked the parking lot looking for spare pennies, for thirty-one cents, exactly enough to buy a loaf of cheap bread.
I wrote a poem that Thanksgiving. I sat on the deck of a shoddy apartment on the banks of the Nisqually river, back against the wall, frozen, tired, swollen. I don't know what possessed me to take a pencil and mark the occasion on the back of a grocery receipt, but I did. I stuck it in my wallet. I keep it with me to this day.
Nisqually
The water is so black and cold
it swirls with native fish, chum with pink tails and monsoon eyes
they sneak through mirror water and want to leave me a message
but I can't hear them
my ears are full, just like my belly
the grasses below the water collect the message
let it sink to the silt
sink to mud silt
The day after I first walked my youngest son to kindergarten, I knew I was no potential Big Shot. My bills sat in a messy pile on the edge of the kitchen counter. I couldn't pay them. I collected welfare. I paid for eggs and milk with the swipe of my food stamp card. The day I shoved book into briar was the last day I sat in a classroom.
There's gotta be a better way. I hate living like this. I hate the sun, this perpetual arc of harsh photons that never slows. It always looks like summer here, even when my heart is
