by James Steck
Les Deux Alpes
I’m a million miles old
smoking snow through an open window
keeping up with
a mountain trying to outwrite
it in the dark
one inch at a time.
Hey, I’ve been a glacier, too
I’ve been a frozen canopy
of skyscrapers like you
and I argue
while
music hums through
the atoms of the apartment
and strums and strums –
a palindrome sound –
I repeat myself again like I’m twenty –
and…I am not.
I light a cigarette – another – another –
it’s a cliffside obsession.
La Meije glares at me.
I do not belong.
The Teacher
A canopy shades–
a wave breaks–
what do you know
about teaching?
The humidity of it –
the choices
the choices
self-doubt so much
so much of it
climbs and climbs
limbs its way up –
sometimes…
monstrous
sometimes…
nightmare
Sometimes…you grind inhuman sentences out…
‘It’s a thankless job.’ ‘It’s noble.’
‘Your students
probably have
crushes on you.’
‘What is it like ‘You must be the cool teacher.’ ‘I couldn’t do what you do’
to teach your favorite
books all the time?’
‘I hated my teachers.’
‘Do you have any
asshole students?’
‘Do kids cheat all the time?’
‘I would love
to be a teacher,
but the pay is awful.’
‘It must be so nice to do nothing during summer.’
Lucidity
is the sacrifice.
It feels
wrong all wrong
dreams that wind their way
beneath someone else’s deference.
What do you know
about teaching?
Up at night
stuck to your bed
in the morning.
I have walked through gardens
once myself
like you
too
time swings on vines held
by canopy arms. We are
the arms. A year single year steams
its vapor up from roots
and life and all of you are
protected beneath
our canopy.
I anger. I disgust. I revolt. I exhaust.
The world is tired of the salty whine of it all.
How do you write about teaching?
How do you do it?
Word each word is not enough word.
No formula of words can do it.
The books and the books and the books
how to teach how to teach
how to engage how to reignite ignite achieve
your classroom doesn’t look like the authors’
but theirs did.
Am I getting too young to feel like this?
At some point how much
propaganda can a culture take?
Industries of teaching burn on
suffocating life – the industries we have been
sold and bought and made.
You have to be steady.
The same.
But flexible too.
You have to remove yourself from yourself
but be present too.
You have to stay separate and model
vulnerability too.
You have to love but not love.
You have to sing but not too much.
You have dance but not too much.
You have to help but not help.
You have to access their confidence but not too much.
You have to be honest but not too honest.
Stop trying so hard; stop putting your care all over everything.
Just teach, shut up and leave. Just teach, shut up and leave.
Teaching isn’t a poem
we grow old we grow old
for your children.
Stop writing books about teaching.
Stop it.
Write books about writing.
Teach it. Stop teaching teaching.
Stop the research.
Stop the data the data the data the data.
Non-linear life – recursive recursive inconsistent.
It crushes and then builds then crushes then builds
rolling in on itself all over its own mess it swells and folds and breaks and tries again.
Teaching.
The landscape emerges grey
– a light blinks out –
and breaks.
Sometimes I doubt who I am
I think and think I am always guilty
I am a tattered coat
upon a stick.
100 years old only
in my bones.
Restlessly
I dream my dreams
collecting nightmare dust
because it is not
what you think it is.
We are the evaporate of ourselves –
we are the condensation on windowpanes.
The sun boils the earth:
a thick viscous film of soap covers
the halls of schools
in a Venus paranoia
and you worry about
books.
You wash the floor and wall and ceiling
until
we are nothing but shredded paper and highway rust.
Sunlight is a quiet metaphor for us
we leave for –
year after year
and perhaps it is time
to scatter like ants
to our colonies
of dissidence away from the death
there are guns firing
in our fucking synapses
because it is not
what you think it is.
Eventually, we hear the summer storms roll
over such humid thoughts and we are told
‘you’re lucky to be here’
this time it’s all hotter than
ever before.
The sky
releases rain in a new way now–
it is
Urgency.
It is not beautiful
It falls hard without care
or intention–we have done too much
to prune petrichor into a garden
of indie songs and plastic reels.
The slow smokeless burning of decay
drifts in on the offbeat of the lightning
fills the space
the thunder
and here is the rain.
There is you
When in a crowd
my pocket holds the entire night
and when I reach my hand
inside of the hole I find the
beginning of time and also
your hand
wriggling
to get to me.
When in the kitchen
I cook a vibrant broth
a stew clenches
together like a diamond
I have condensed from the day
and the way you say in passing
‘I’d like to sleep in the lap of a giant’
so casually
weightless–
I’m hoping to recreate the universe
maybe
maybe with you.
I hope there is a stem
in the soil of my body
weaving tendrils up
reaching
quietly pacing
like the cat lurking
around the kitchen
small leopard small.
Waiting, assessing, circulating.
In the fabric of my pocket
I can pinch darkness so tight in between my fingers
it becomes a twig
that I turn over and over and
I also find you.
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