This poem is similar to a short story I wrote
Its purpose was to mimic a specific modernist poem
I chose William Straffords "Traveling Through the Dark"
Here is my attempt at a poem of the same nature
Hearing Night Outside
Hearing night outside interrupted by a shout
Sleep staggered to window in predawn light.
Hungry, considering sausage, I saw dad
And a cow tied to a tree, knotted rope taut.
Hand fumbling with sill in the dim glimmer
I hauled up the glass as dad hoisted his gun.
Horror filled eyes bulging from its head
The animal strained; the tethered tree swayed.
Fear struck we three together
My father’s finger shaking on trigger,
Cow’s desperate distended gape,
My throat tight and trying to articulate
Witnessing I wanted to stop it; my heart sickened
Frozen my father viewing down his sites
The cow screeching a second after the blast
It fell forward, a fainting formidable foundation.
A moment’s realization—my first encounter—
My blood barely beating as red ran from the beast.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
A new story, an old theme
Here is a short story written on the topic of Mr. Sayens and my father:
Tendrils
This is a testament to words, struggle and the ability to learn. The best teachers are not in schools.
On April 2nd 1949 I turned 16. In the middle of English class I stood up silently and gently pushed the hard wooden chair under the desk. Mrs. Bergman arched an eyebrow in that scary way she had, expecting an explanation for my actions. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t even grab my books. I just left. A few of the boys started snickering and I heard someone whisper “moron”. I didn’t care anymore. I was tired of scraping by, and the perpetual D. I walked straight to the main office and showed Mrs. Woodward the form signed by my father. She handed me a blue form and pointed to the line for my signature. I signed it, and then I left school, forever.
At home Mom nearly had a conniption, whatever that word means. Don’t even tell me to look it up in a dictionary.
“You did what?” She held a white dishcloth tightly between her two outstretched fists as if she were ready to snap it at me. Her lips formed a perfect parallel line to the taut towel, “Don’t think this is some kind of vacation. Tomorrow you’ll be looking for a job.”
I didn’t tell her I’d already gotten one, and that I started 7 am the next day. People tell me I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid. My parents are not the type to allow for any free rides. They’re part Puritan and part Attila the Hun, if you know what I mean. They have other parts too, but they keep those hidden taking them out for birthdays and Christmases and times like that.
I rode my bike to work early the next morning. A man, who lived a few blocks from us, had been looking for someone to help him in his garden. His name was Mr. Signs. He was something like 80 years old, but he loved that garden. I knew a lot about farming but not much about gardening. Mr. Signs didn’t care, and I didn’t care about health insurance and benefits and all that. It was a job and it paid money. That was good enough for me. Plants are interesting too. They don’t speak, but they do have personalities.
For an old guy, Mr. Signs was crazy.
Sometimes I’d arrive at work and he’d be nowhere. So, I’d start doing anything I could think of—watering or weeding. Then I’d hear this whisper coming from above. “Kennny—Kennny”. Looking up, I’d spot the old man at the top of an oak tree, in his skinnies, smiling and swinging his legs around.
He knew a lot of jokes and stories, a regular Uncle Milty sometimes. If he had broadcasted his own radio program, I think he would have been extremely successful. He had a wife name Lillian and a maid named Hattie. Lillian Signs owned about 300 pairs of shoes, a few mink coats, and got driven into town by a chauffeur. One day she came out on the back porch calling Mr. Signs.
“Mr. Signs! Mr. Signs!” in a high-pitched respectable voice.
Mr. Signs winked at me and called back to her, “Coming Hattie!”
That made Mrs. Signs all flustered and angry, “I’m not Hattie” she said and slammed the door.
Those days with Mr. Signs were a lot more interesting than school had ever been.
His garden, that was a world. I mean, a regular landscape of somewhere else. It reminded me of my own mind, tendrils of pathways all leading around and intersecting with each other, but you never knew which path was which, not in a hundred years. You just followed your nose and relaxed and suddenly you’d come on things, like a shaded pond with wiggling tadpoles or a statue of a naked lady or a deep green lawn with grass like a mattress.
He asked me one day why I dropped out of school. I didn’t have a very good answer. I just told him that it wasn’t for me.
He smiled at that and went on to tell me about all of these famous guys who never finished high school. Did you know Ben Franklin was a dropout?
Another day though, he asked me about the books we read in school.
I kept my head down, and my focus aimed at the ground I was hoeing.
“Never read Jack London?!” Mr. Signs seemed more shocked then I figured he actually could be shocked.
“Why, What in the H. do they have you read at school these days?”
I didn’t answer right away, although the question had a sound to it like it wanted to be answered.
“Fitzgerald.” Mr. Signs speculated.
I just shrugged, and began to put more muscle into my work, breaking up the ground, scarring it deeply with every energized slap of the hoe.
“Twain? Crane? Certainly not Dreiser?”
“Don’t know them.”
“Shakespeare.”
I relaxed a bit and nodded.
“Well, which play?”
My heart began to beat rapidly. I can’t remember titles. Mrs. Bergman had made the class read a play out loud. I’d never been called on to read (the only nice thing Mrs. B ever did for me.). I bent down to pick up a stone. There was no stone and I just felt silly bending down for no reason, although Mr. Sign’s didn’t notice. His attention was directly on my face. I stood and leaned a little on the hoe.
“One about a boy and a girl”
“Romeo and Juliet!” Mr. Signs grinned wide.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“What did you think?”
“It was good” I answered lamely.
“But, what did you think” Mr. Signs pressed.
It had taken about three days of English classes to read through that play. I had thought a lot about it. In class Mrs. Bergman had asked us questions during the reading. I had wanted so badly to raise my hand. I remember one of the boys saying that Juliet was a tease and Romeo was stupid to go through all that trouble for a girl.
“Romeo wasn’t stupid.” I said to Mr. Signs. I was afraid he was going to laugh at me, or something.
Mr. Sign’s smile just lit up like daffodils in early April. “Yes?” he said, and waited a bit.
“Well” I said, twisting that hoe around and watching it churn up soil. “Some people think Romeo is stupid, you know to die for love. But I think that’s the point. Some things are more important than death.” I waited for Mr. Signs to tell me I was wrong. He didn’t. He just started talking up a storm. All about the play, and asking me more questions then anybody has ever asked me in one hour. I forgot all about my stupidity. I had wanted to talk to someone about that play since my classmates read it out loud, but I was afraid to. We didn’t do much gardening that day.
“Hang on for just a moment” Mr. Signs seemed excited now. There was something in his trot as he turned and made for the house. After a moment I could hear him acting like he was Romeo and quoting famous lines from the play.
I finished hoeing and decided to weed a flowerbed near where we were standing. I felt good. Mr. Signs had listened to everything I’d said about Romeo and Juliet. Sometimes he had nodded his head, excitedly. I pulled weeds with vigor, imaging them to be fellow classmates in English class.
By the time Mr. S. returned I’d dug up my entire class and piled them into a green heap.
Mr. Signs carried a book in his hands and a bright smile on his face.
He held the book out to me.
I looked at it. It was enormous. An old faded green cloth book. Bigger than any book I had ever seen.
I felt sick.
“Well go ahead, boy. Take it.”
I was still kneeling from the weeding. My heart beat so fast and hard, the throb of it shook my finger tips as I slowly reached out to retrieve the book.
Mr. S delicately released it over to me like a mother allowing someone she trusted to hold her baby.
It was heavier than I thought and it immediately dropped onto my raised knee. Simultaneously my finger caressed the book’s cover, and traced the ingrained letters of the title, as my head stared to ache.
“It doesn’t have the sonnets, but all the comedies and tragedies are there. Take your time with it, there’s no rush. But try to read something soon so we can discuss it. I suggest Tempest.”
I couldn’t think. There was a tempest all right, but that was in my head.
“I…” I said, dumbly looking at the book’s cover, my finger still dancing over it. It occurred to me that the letters, whichever ones they were, looked like vines of Wisteria or ivy running up the side of an old wall.
“Let me show you” Mr. Signs said, and sat down next to me. I wanted him to take that book away. He didn’t. Using my knee as a table he opened the book and started flipping through pages like a madman. All those wiggly tendrils of letters passing by so fast, I felt like I was going to be ill. He finally came to the page he wanted. He pointed.
There!” He said, triumphantly.
It was full of tiny squiggly lines. I tried to focus my vision, and discern the individual letters, see what he wanted to show me. Shapes like intertwined vines confused my focus. I was pretty sure the first letter was a tee—like a tree. After the tee the letters seemed to be sewn threw the page with an erratic needle. Blossoming creepers, like flowers chocked by parasitic weedy creepers filled my vision. My heart pounded and my head felt dizzy, everything began to slide around. Whenever I tried to concentrate on a section of the page, my eyes became confused and I couldn’t find the letters. Sweat began to form at my forehead and my back became rigid.
Mr. Signs began to notice something wrong. He looked at me and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“What’s wrong?”
I wanted to say I was wrong. I wanted to shout it. I hated this. I hated holding this volume of beautiful written things and not be able to engage in it. Like a rosebush trying to grow in a dark and shadowy forest, trying to reach the sun, but just drying up, losing all its buds, leaving only the thorns, which turned brown from lack of light. The others were right. My mother, Mrs. Bergman, my classmates were all right. I was a moron.
“I can’t read.” I said. And I swear, this one tear, one damned tiny tear, escaped from the edge of my eyeball. Just one, and it felt like a lot of pain, and anger, and—I don’t know—sliding down my face.
Mr. Signs got real quiet, sorta respectful. He took the book off my knee and laid it in his lap. The sunlight had gotten all golden and shimmery like right before sunset. I looked out at the light. I knew you weren’t supposed to look directly at the sun, but somehow I didn’t care.
Then quietly, but not like whispering or anything, I heard Mr. Sign’s voice.
“The Tempest,” he said, “By William Shakespeare. Act I, scene I…”
It took a few years to find someone who actually understood my dyslexia. Eventually I learned how to read. It was one of the hardest things to achieve in my life. It never would have happened if Mr. Signs hadn’t wanted to share his Shakespearse and Fitzgeralds, Lord Byrons and Walt Whitmans and all the rest. The best teachers are not in school.
Tendrils
This is a testament to words, struggle and the ability to learn. The best teachers are not in schools.
On April 2nd 1949 I turned 16. In the middle of English class I stood up silently and gently pushed the hard wooden chair under the desk. Mrs. Bergman arched an eyebrow in that scary way she had, expecting an explanation for my actions. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t even grab my books. I just left. A few of the boys started snickering and I heard someone whisper “moron”. I didn’t care anymore. I was tired of scraping by, and the perpetual D. I walked straight to the main office and showed Mrs. Woodward the form signed by my father. She handed me a blue form and pointed to the line for my signature. I signed it, and then I left school, forever.
At home Mom nearly had a conniption, whatever that word means. Don’t even tell me to look it up in a dictionary.
“You did what?” She held a white dishcloth tightly between her two outstretched fists as if she were ready to snap it at me. Her lips formed a perfect parallel line to the taut towel, “Don’t think this is some kind of vacation. Tomorrow you’ll be looking for a job.”
I didn’t tell her I’d already gotten one, and that I started 7 am the next day. People tell me I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid. My parents are not the type to allow for any free rides. They’re part Puritan and part Attila the Hun, if you know what I mean. They have other parts too, but they keep those hidden taking them out for birthdays and Christmases and times like that.
I rode my bike to work early the next morning. A man, who lived a few blocks from us, had been looking for someone to help him in his garden. His name was Mr. Signs. He was something like 80 years old, but he loved that garden. I knew a lot about farming but not much about gardening. Mr. Signs didn’t care, and I didn’t care about health insurance and benefits and all that. It was a job and it paid money. That was good enough for me. Plants are interesting too. They don’t speak, but they do have personalities.
For an old guy, Mr. Signs was crazy.
Sometimes I’d arrive at work and he’d be nowhere. So, I’d start doing anything I could think of—watering or weeding. Then I’d hear this whisper coming from above. “Kennny—Kennny”. Looking up, I’d spot the old man at the top of an oak tree, in his skinnies, smiling and swinging his legs around.
He knew a lot of jokes and stories, a regular Uncle Milty sometimes. If he had broadcasted his own radio program, I think he would have been extremely successful. He had a wife name Lillian and a maid named Hattie. Lillian Signs owned about 300 pairs of shoes, a few mink coats, and got driven into town by a chauffeur. One day she came out on the back porch calling Mr. Signs.
“Mr. Signs! Mr. Signs!” in a high-pitched respectable voice.
Mr. Signs winked at me and called back to her, “Coming Hattie!”
That made Mrs. Signs all flustered and angry, “I’m not Hattie” she said and slammed the door.
Those days with Mr. Signs were a lot more interesting than school had ever been.
His garden, that was a world. I mean, a regular landscape of somewhere else. It reminded me of my own mind, tendrils of pathways all leading around and intersecting with each other, but you never knew which path was which, not in a hundred years. You just followed your nose and relaxed and suddenly you’d come on things, like a shaded pond with wiggling tadpoles or a statue of a naked lady or a deep green lawn with grass like a mattress.
He asked me one day why I dropped out of school. I didn’t have a very good answer. I just told him that it wasn’t for me.
He smiled at that and went on to tell me about all of these famous guys who never finished high school. Did you know Ben Franklin was a dropout?
Another day though, he asked me about the books we read in school.
I kept my head down, and my focus aimed at the ground I was hoeing.
“Never read Jack London?!” Mr. Signs seemed more shocked then I figured he actually could be shocked.
“Why, What in the H. do they have you read at school these days?”
I didn’t answer right away, although the question had a sound to it like it wanted to be answered.
“Fitzgerald.” Mr. Signs speculated.
I just shrugged, and began to put more muscle into my work, breaking up the ground, scarring it deeply with every energized slap of the hoe.
“Twain? Crane? Certainly not Dreiser?”
“Don’t know them.”
“Shakespeare.”
I relaxed a bit and nodded.
“Well, which play?”
My heart began to beat rapidly. I can’t remember titles. Mrs. Bergman had made the class read a play out loud. I’d never been called on to read (the only nice thing Mrs. B ever did for me.). I bent down to pick up a stone. There was no stone and I just felt silly bending down for no reason, although Mr. Sign’s didn’t notice. His attention was directly on my face. I stood and leaned a little on the hoe.
“One about a boy and a girl”
“Romeo and Juliet!” Mr. Signs grinned wide.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“What did you think?”
“It was good” I answered lamely.
“But, what did you think” Mr. Signs pressed.
It had taken about three days of English classes to read through that play. I had thought a lot about it. In class Mrs. Bergman had asked us questions during the reading. I had wanted so badly to raise my hand. I remember one of the boys saying that Juliet was a tease and Romeo was stupid to go through all that trouble for a girl.
“Romeo wasn’t stupid.” I said to Mr. Signs. I was afraid he was going to laugh at me, or something.
Mr. Sign’s smile just lit up like daffodils in early April. “Yes?” he said, and waited a bit.
“Well” I said, twisting that hoe around and watching it churn up soil. “Some people think Romeo is stupid, you know to die for love. But I think that’s the point. Some things are more important than death.” I waited for Mr. Signs to tell me I was wrong. He didn’t. He just started talking up a storm. All about the play, and asking me more questions then anybody has ever asked me in one hour. I forgot all about my stupidity. I had wanted to talk to someone about that play since my classmates read it out loud, but I was afraid to. We didn’t do much gardening that day.
“Hang on for just a moment” Mr. Signs seemed excited now. There was something in his trot as he turned and made for the house. After a moment I could hear him acting like he was Romeo and quoting famous lines from the play.
I finished hoeing and decided to weed a flowerbed near where we were standing. I felt good. Mr. Signs had listened to everything I’d said about Romeo and Juliet. Sometimes he had nodded his head, excitedly. I pulled weeds with vigor, imaging them to be fellow classmates in English class.
By the time Mr. S. returned I’d dug up my entire class and piled them into a green heap.
Mr. Signs carried a book in his hands and a bright smile on his face.
He held the book out to me.
I looked at it. It was enormous. An old faded green cloth book. Bigger than any book I had ever seen.
I felt sick.
“Well go ahead, boy. Take it.”
I was still kneeling from the weeding. My heart beat so fast and hard, the throb of it shook my finger tips as I slowly reached out to retrieve the book.
Mr. S delicately released it over to me like a mother allowing someone she trusted to hold her baby.
It was heavier than I thought and it immediately dropped onto my raised knee. Simultaneously my finger caressed the book’s cover, and traced the ingrained letters of the title, as my head stared to ache.
“It doesn’t have the sonnets, but all the comedies and tragedies are there. Take your time with it, there’s no rush. But try to read something soon so we can discuss it. I suggest Tempest.”
I couldn’t think. There was a tempest all right, but that was in my head.
“I…” I said, dumbly looking at the book’s cover, my finger still dancing over it. It occurred to me that the letters, whichever ones they were, looked like vines of Wisteria or ivy running up the side of an old wall.
“Let me show you” Mr. Signs said, and sat down next to me. I wanted him to take that book away. He didn’t. Using my knee as a table he opened the book and started flipping through pages like a madman. All those wiggly tendrils of letters passing by so fast, I felt like I was going to be ill. He finally came to the page he wanted. He pointed.
There!” He said, triumphantly.
It was full of tiny squiggly lines. I tried to focus my vision, and discern the individual letters, see what he wanted to show me. Shapes like intertwined vines confused my focus. I was pretty sure the first letter was a tee—like a tree. After the tee the letters seemed to be sewn threw the page with an erratic needle. Blossoming creepers, like flowers chocked by parasitic weedy creepers filled my vision. My heart pounded and my head felt dizzy, everything began to slide around. Whenever I tried to concentrate on a section of the page, my eyes became confused and I couldn’t find the letters. Sweat began to form at my forehead and my back became rigid.
Mr. Signs began to notice something wrong. He looked at me and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“What’s wrong?”
I wanted to say I was wrong. I wanted to shout it. I hated this. I hated holding this volume of beautiful written things and not be able to engage in it. Like a rosebush trying to grow in a dark and shadowy forest, trying to reach the sun, but just drying up, losing all its buds, leaving only the thorns, which turned brown from lack of light. The others were right. My mother, Mrs. Bergman, my classmates were all right. I was a moron.
“I can’t read.” I said. And I swear, this one tear, one damned tiny tear, escaped from the edge of my eyeball. Just one, and it felt like a lot of pain, and anger, and—I don’t know—sliding down my face.
Mr. Signs got real quiet, sorta respectful. He took the book off my knee and laid it in his lap. The sunlight had gotten all golden and shimmery like right before sunset. I looked out at the light. I knew you weren’t supposed to look directly at the sun, but somehow I didn’t care.
Then quietly, but not like whispering or anything, I heard Mr. Sign’s voice.
“The Tempest,” he said, “By William Shakespeare. Act I, scene I…”
It took a few years to find someone who actually understood my dyslexia. Eventually I learned how to read. It was one of the hardest things to achieve in my life. It never would have happened if Mr. Signs hadn’t wanted to share his Shakespearse and Fitzgeralds, Lord Byrons and Walt Whitmans and all the rest. The best teachers are not in school.
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