how it came to pass that i left poetry, continued
Feb. 8, 2010 9: 43 a.m.
Highway 167 South. One police car. Two police cars. Three police cars. Four. Five. Six police cars, each coming into view one at a time as I move closer and as other cars to the left of me pass, opening up a window onto the scene. One ambulance, doors closed. No activity around it. No gurney. No paramedics. No mobile medical equipment. No movement.
One fire truck, also silent.
In 92 minutes, the children in a class I work with will listen to a song about what a great day today is. “Be grateful for this day,” the song will tell them. I read them a story called A Monkey Among Us, and they pick out all the colors in the book. Orange. Blue. Green. Purple. Pink. Red. We count the colors and add them up. “How many is that,” I ask. They reply with various answers, anywhere from one to seven. For some, the colors are easier. For others, the numbers are easier. When I hold up a piece of plastic fruit, some yell out its color first, others its name. Which is more important for any given class or any given child — description or signification — seems to follow no pattern.
Margaret holds the letter “P” in her hands, a plastic magnet that is part of a larger set. She does this every week with a different letter. She can’t listen to stories without sneaking over to the tray of letters and snatching one.
Joseph has a new backpack. He can’t do anything without wearing his backpack. He keeps it on all day long. When I ask each child to do a silly dance move for the others to imitate, Joseph’s move is to turn slightly and show off his backpack. We all pretend to have backpacks. We turn to show them off to one another.
Halfway through a story, Margaret’s “P” slips from her hands and falls to the floor.
I tell her it’s OK. We all have accidents.
Two of the police cars are on the other side of the median, the rest on my side. The ambulance and fire truck are on my side as well. I say “my side” as if I own this highway, or at least this stretch of it. The way Margaret calls the letters in the tray hers, as if she owns the alphabet.
The way is straight here, clear. Portions of this highway are very unsafe, but this is not one of them. The median is wide, covered in grass and weeds that are still green, thanks to the Pacific Northwest’s temperate winters. I am not even wearing a coat today. Another highway stretches overhead. Several large pillars extend up in support, like old-growth trees rising from the earth. They have not yet been retrofitted with metal fittings to make them more earthquake-resistant.
Joseph has stealthily left the circle. He scoots to the classroom’s far wall. I ask him to come back. He shakes his head. I smile. He shows me his backpack. I smile. He unzips it and begins removing toys. A plastic jet plane. A plastic choo-choo train. A plastic car. Another plastic car. He points to the car in the artwork on his backpack. I smile.
Traffic is backed up both northbound and southbound. People are impatient. They shift in their cars, grumble. When they pass the scene, they lay on the gas.
We are all standing now, going through the motions of the hokey pokey, which has been reinterpreted in a children’s book called Sock Monkeys Do the Monkey Monkey.
“We put our tails in. We put our tails out. We put our tails in and we shake them all about. We do the monkey monkey and we wiggle all about. That’s how we scream and shout.”
The children mix things up as we go along. For example, right and left — arbitrary concepts they haven’t quite mastered yet. When I tell them to put their tails in, some protest, “But we don’t have tails.” I tell them that they do. I tell them they can be anything they want, even a monkey with a tail. Our dance isn’t very precise, but that’s OK, too. I tell them we all make mistakes. We don’t have to be perfect.
What strikes me is the precision. The truck impacted one of the pillars exactly in the middle. What I can see suggests a direct line from the highway to the pillar. No swerve or brake marks on the highway. This is one of the only areas where there is no wall blocking the median, where the median and pillars are accessible. This was not an especially easy mark to locate, or hit.
We are singing along to “Knuckles Knees.” The song requires us to touch our knuckles to our eyes, noses, stomachs, toes, hips, lips, legs and hair. As the progression becomes faster, none of the children can keep up. I can’t keep up, either. “Going this fast is hard,” I tell them. Though they don’t verbally agree with me, the look of bewilderment on their faces tells me they think it’s hard, too. “Boo,” I say to the song.
Two colors stand out. Yellow and red. Yellow is the color of the tarp covering the body. Red is the blood all over the airbag and what is left of the front of the vehicle. I begin screaming when the site comes into full view, though I knew this was what I would see. As soon as I counted more than three police cars, I knew it was really bad. The overall lack of movement, the stillness, told me it was fatal.
An instructor has inadvertently knocked some of the letters out of their tray. The children look over in unison. “Another accident,” I say. “It’s OK. It’s all just fine.”
Driving back from the school, I count tire marks left by previous travelers who have had to apply their brakes quickly. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. I get into double digits. I only stop when I realize the tire marks are everywhere. I see a cluster of three crosses off to the right side of the road. Dates are written on the crosses, but I am going too fast to make them out.
I think about what I saw earlier. Single-car accident. In light traffic. On a clear day. No entry into oncoming traffic. I think of someone I know, someone once dear to me, whose suicidal ideation is always about driving off the side of a highway and into a pillar. “Some days it just seems so easy,” he has told me.
I get home and open an email from W.F. Roby and Emily Van Duyne.
“Here’s the text of an Exquisite Corpse,” W.F. writes. They sent it, he explains, because they think I might love it or hate it.
The word corpse throws me at first. I ask if I can include the poem in a piece I am writing about an accident I saw on the highway today. “I would rather talk about the exquisite corpse than the real one,” I explain.
Emily says I can use the poem. I realize it does not appear to have a title. I decide to say the first line is the title, at least for now. I’m sure they will let me know if I’ve made a mistake. No biggie. Words can be changed, and what we do with them can be changed. That’s one nice thing about language.
* * *
Rain Sounds like a Choir Clapping Somewhere
Rain sounds like a choir clapping somewhere
over there, away, distant. Over here
faintest lump in the throat, guzzle of rain,
a brilliant career. The real you
bent back against bricks. Snow sounds like
a holler into a windstorm, empty like that:
a snare drum, a brush, a stick of peppermint gum
chewed to bits, tongued to a bubble and popped.
Weather’s like that — turning faces to flash replicas
or mirroring a bad habit by blacking out the light.
Light’s a poor teacher. It blacks the spaces
it neglects: purpled half-moons underneath the dull eyes you deflect.
Sound is worse: the snorting car under a spotlight, the hiss of toll-road change
slung into the bucket, the burp of a tire, the a-ha of a cop. Strange.
Think of Venus and Adonis as you know them — the sunshine
lays its palm against his plum-tucked face and she’s a goner,
mortal for a bit, in love. She’s a stone-fruit married to a knife,
an old copy of the Game of Life missing a few pieces, rubbed
to ruin, pale at the corners — he’s
a bluebell in a wasp’s blue bonnet, broken nest strung from an Elm tree
in a made-up place, an English wood, bobbled just above a lady’s hat. She sleeps.
It’s peaceful. Neat in the shadow of a church steeple. Night’s like that –
sealing your ears to keep out gallons of water. Snow on the Welcome mat.
Snow stuck to shoulders and hats, flurried into paper, shredded into flakes,
someone’s week-old divorce ripped to bits and flung, a cap on graduation day, confetti.
