Classroom, Edge, Highs in the low Seventies, Pipe smoke, The Director of Antiquities: a photograph, 1953 & Yorick sings
by Andrew Shields
[ poetry - october 08 ]
Classroom
for Jamie Bishop (1971-2007)
The tables are black, with room for two students.
There are four of them in each of two rows.
On the back walls hangs a black box of technology,
for audio; above it, suspended from the ceiling,
a beamer. In front of the blackboard
is a screen to project on, and an overhead
is in the corner, with its own movable screen
attached to the wall beside the blackboard.
In the corner are a sink and a garbage can,
a soap dispenser and a paper-towel holder.
Teachers' hands can get dry with chalk,
as mine were as I stood at the board
writing down the past participles
of irregular verbs: gegeben, geholfen,
geraten, geschrieen. I was putting down the chalk,
turning back to face the class, when the door opened.
I turned to say a class was still in session.
On the wooden strip running along the floor
under the blackboard is a small trace
of dried blood the cleaning crew missed.
Don't look for it; once you see it,
you won't be able to concentrate any more.
Gesehen, geschossen, gestorben, gewesen.
Edge
Across the curving waters, far from home,
a park in the Old World, ice on the ground,
low winter clouds, each breath another cloud.
A dog, unleashed, crossing the field, alone
with what it's chasing, running back to find
its master's feet, the story of his hands
and roughly scratching fingers, of a land
to return to, an ordered world to mind,
complete with corner nook and bed beside
the hearth. Stand in the park, a Sargasso Sea,
a doldrums, watch the dogs and masters, be
still as a sail with no wind left inside,
wait until the cold says where to head,
a bed not in a home but still a bed,
though one so narrow fear lies at its edge,
as if the world were square and heaven whole,
the way to the New World blocked not by cold
but by the flat earth's limits, the park's hedge.
If Columbus underestimated
the true circumference of the earth, so that
he first found only water where he'd thought
to find the Indies (claiming even later
that was indeed what he had found), at least
America was there to rescue him.
The running dog, the winter on cold skin,
the sailors clamoring to turn back east,
no more wind blowing, Indies to the west,
a cloud across the heavens
Highs in the low Seventies
The summer's weather waits on the Atlantic,
a puffin's wingbeat making all the difference,
or none, between a board game and a picnic
some August afternoon. The year's first swifts
come curving out of the late April dusk;
they'll go back to Africa before
that choice is made, between rain and risk,
between sun and thunder. The shutting of a door,
a moment's pause to listen to a bird
singing out of sight, is enough to decide.
Time hovers like a kestrel or a tern;
I hover, but I do not strike: I ride
the seasons like a buoy the ocean rings:
Here's shallow water. The puffin folds its wings.
Pipe smoke
Grandpa died at the end of the war,
but not of the war. He died of the flu.
The flu took him when I was four,
took the finest smell I knew:
pipe smoke and whisky. Papa chose
cheap cigarettes and cheaper wine,
or they chose him. Where Grandpa rose
from nothing to whisky (every line
he put his money in was good),
everything that Papa tried
led back to wine: from coffin wood
and dimestore rings to fixing fights
and running bootleg gin. His sons
could see he couldn't hold his wine
like his father. His drinking done,
he'd come to beat us. Grandpa's pipe
lay on the mantelpiece unsmoked
until my elder brother stole
some pipe tobacco that he smoked
with our two cousins and me. We stole
out of the house one early morning,
and made our way through town to where
we spent the years between the wars,
our childhood: the cemetery,
the family crypt, our Grandpa's grave.
Coughing, we dropped the pipe. It broke,
and then we four could not escape
a beating. The smell of the wine and the smoke
of cheap cigarettes erased the taste
of Grandpa's pipe. His taste for theft
awakened, my brother stole a case
of dusty bootleg gin still left
from my father's failure, too cheap
even for him to drink. We drank
the entire case, my father asleep
from a binge of his own. When he woke, we stank
of vomit and gin, and the beating that came
was the last we'd ever know:
rings had opened my brother's face
when I brought a bottle down
on my father's head. Who mourned
his death? My brother ran away
as soon as he saw him fall. I swore
at him for leaving me that day,
and to everyone else I swore
my brother'd done it. He never came
back home again. Before the war,
we met by chance once more, his face
still scarred. We drank, then drank some more<
whisky I heard he died at the end of the war,
but of the war, and not of the flu.
The Director of Antiquities: a photograph, 1953
The story's not apocryphal: a herdsman found
the Dead Sea Scrolls and took them home for fire.
But when he tried to sell a few, the news got round
as fast as smoke. Their value rose much higher
as artifacts than fuel. Yet they remained beset
by flame, or so this photograph suggests: the scraps
of scroll in the Director's fingers, and in his lips
(he rolls his own) a burning cigarette.
Yorick sings
for Robin Höher
Good morrow, my sweet lord! How dost thou? My dust
returns your greeting from my doomsday's house.
Just as I mark your love, warn you I must:
questing crowners will soon dissect the laws
of all your pregnant problems and infinite jests.
Mark my words, as they will mark yours, my lord:
your lips, like those you kissed, when no more flesh,
will have no more matter than all your words.
'Gainst that, my lord, let us recall the hours
in which I bore you young upon my back,
and I will mock my grinning, mocking yours,
and from clown's grave with my clown's witting match
with each of your curious considerations
a card of absolute equivocation.
